If there is one place where the rehabilitation of subliterary genres implied in many affirmations of a return to the story appears to have had great success, it is in the domain of crime fiction. In France, romance novels, fantasy, and to a lesser extent science fiction carry connotations of frivolity, but there is increasingly a sense that crime fiction has left its minor status behind and become accepted as part of France's cultural patrimony. This is perhaps only fitting given the important role that French writers, directors, and editors—in particular Marcel Duhamel with his Série Noire crime fiction collection at Gallimard—played first in defining violent American pulp fiction as noir, and subsequently in cultivating that genre. French-language writers such as Léo Malet, Georges Simenon, and Didier Daeninckx, illustrators such as Jacques Tardi, and directors such as Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jean-Pierre Melville have had a substantial influence on crime fiction on both sides of the Atlantic. In histories of French crime fiction, it is generally accepted that the modern French noir novel arrived in the 1970s, which saw an efflorescence of politically charged crime novels. This crime fiction has often been grouped under the vague label néo-polar (neo-crime novel). Alongside the radical (though not always leftist) political content of such novels, many commentators have noted a penchant for stylistic experimentation in the crime narratives of the 1980s and 1990s, notably in the works of authors like Daniel Pennac and Jean Vautrin. This latter development is often credited with lifting the noir out of the purely instrumental storytelling of popular fiction—the derogatory and mythical ‘pure narration’ that is sometimes ascribed to bad novels—and associating it with the concerns of serious literature.