Among those drafted into the Alpine infantry in late 1914 was the twenty-year-old bank clerk Jean Giono, son of an artisan cobbler and a laundress in the Haute-Provence village of Manosque. He emerged more than four years later, “soldat de deuxieme classe, sans croix de guerre.” He had suffered the battles of Eparges, Verdun (where he was one of only a handful of survivors from his regiment), Chemin des Dames, and Kemmel. During a brief interlude in England, where he underwent treatment for gas exposure, he rescued a fellow patient—a blinded English officer—when the hospital caught fire. He was awarded a British medal, his only decoration.

Giono’s autobiographical novel of 1932, Jean le Bleu, ends with this memory: “It was easy for me to go to war without much strong emotion, simply because I was young, and over all young men, a wind was blowing the scent of sails and pirates.” The war left him a fervent, lifelong pacifist, and in 1939 his antiwar activism led to a three-month imprisonment at Marseilles. In 1945, at fifty, he was again imprisoned—this time accused of collaboration with the Vichy government because his writing had been published and his dramas produced during the Occupation. He was placed on a blacklist of writers. At the end of six months, he was acquitted and the public learned of his successful wartime efforts to shelter a number of victims of Nazi persecution.

In September and October of the following year, Giono wrote A King Alone (Un Roi sans divertissement), the story of a remote Alpine village tormented by a serial killer. The novel marks a departure from the pastoral tales of his early career, which were rooted in his love of Greek and Latin literature, and his 1941 homage to Herman Melville, Melville (published in the NYRB Classics series). A King Alone is the first of those novels Giono called his chroniques—designed not so much as histories as layered and unresolved narrations. These were to be “more recounted than written” and A King Alone is assembled from the words of a narrator who is recounting layers of reported speech. This is the technique of legends and of the game we call in English “Chinese whispers”: repetitions inevitably resulting in distortions that open to the wishes and fantasies of even the most certain and rational of speakers. Giono had been reading detective novels from the popular Série noire imprint, and in A King Alone he creates a disconcerting atmosphere of both suspense and retrospection. We readers, like the villagers, are listeners, on edge and searching for clues, assembling patterns, anticipating catastrophes that happened many generations ago and yet continue to hold the villagers in thrall.