Trouble in the Swaths

A rollicking adventure caper satirizing the soon-to-be ubiquitous aspects of spy sagas.

First published posthumously in 1966, Trouble in the Swaths was written by Boris Vian for a small audience of family and friends during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. It is a flippant, at times outrageous parody of genre fiction laced through with bursts of Sadean violence, absurdist slapstick and excessive wordplay in which the author makes his fictionalized debut under such anagrammed monikers as the Baron Visi and the detective Brisavion.

Despite preceding Ian Fleming’s novels by several years, Trouble in the Swaths nonetheless anticipates and ridicules such spy thrillers and their sexism, casual murders, plot twists and technological gadgetry. The adventure involves grenades and machine guns, planes and parachutes, trapdoors and underground caverns, a secret manuscript that endeavors to absorb the novel and, at the center of it all, the core of the narrative maelstrom: the “forked barbarin.”

Boris Vian (1920–59) was a French polymath best known for his novels: both the crime novels he published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan and the surrealistic writing he published under his own name.