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René Belletto, French Crime Novelist and Prix Femina Winner for L'Enfer, Dies at 81

The Lyon writer behind Sur la terre comme au ciel and L'Enfer died on Sunday, his publisher P.O.L told AFP. Two of his novels became films.

The Publishing Times Staff · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

René Belletto, the Lyon novelist whose crime and fantastic fiction won him the Prix Femina in 1986, has died at 81. He died on Sunday, October 25. His publisher, P.O.L, announced the death to the French news agency AFP on Monday, franceinfo reported. Les Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace and 20 Minutes carried the same AFP report. No cause of death was given.

He wrote more than twenty books.

The Lyon trilogy

Belletto broke through in the early 1980s with what French critics call his "Lyon trilogy." It opened with Le Revenant in 1981. The second book, Sur la terre comme au ciel, won the Grand Prix de littérature policière in 1983, which is France's best-known award for crime fiction. Michel Deville turned that novel into the film Péril en la demeure (released in English as Death in a French Garden), and in 1986 Deville took the César for best director for it.

The third book, L'Enfer, did even better. In 1986 it won the Prix Femina and the Prix du Livre Inter. A crime novel winning the Femina, one of France's major literary prizes, was not something you saw every year.

In 1990 came La Machine, about a psychiatrist who builds a device that moves one person's mind into someone else's body. It too was filmed, with Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye.

Guitar, Bach and Lyon

Belletto was born in Lyon on September 11, 1945, and stayed attached to the city all his life. He grew up in the Spanish quarter of Villeurbanne, next door; his mother came from Almería in Andalusia. He taught literature, and for a while he also taught guitar. He wrote film criticism for a small Lyon magazine, Lyon-Poche. In 1990 he wrote for television, scripting episodes of the police series Le Lyonnais for France 2.

Music ran through his life. He loved Johann Sebastian Bach, and his last book, Jean-Sébastien Bach, came out from P.O.L in 2023.

Why it matters for writers

Belletto never treated genre as a lower shelf. He wrote crime novels and fantastic fiction, and the literary establishment gave him its prizes anyway. He also kept the same publisher, P.O.L, into his late seventies. Writers who move between thrillers, the uncanny and plain literary work sometimes worry they'll be filed in one box. His career is a decent answer to that worry.

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