These twenty-five stories [in La Fille du Shérif] have been gleaned from Marcel Aymé's papers and provided with a minimal critical apparatus by Michel Lecureur, some of whose notes (“unidentified review, probably in Morocco in the 1960s”) intrigue more than they inform. But apart from such puzzles, and one previously unpublished story for which Lecureur does not hazard a date, most of the pieces are traced to periodicals of the early 1930s and early 1950s, when the French social and political scene provided Aymé with ready targets for satire.

Comparisons across the period (1929 to 1962) covered by the stories reveal the consistency of Aymé's method and the continuity of his themes. “Le Monument”, for example, exposes a snobbery and narrow-mindedness typical of small-town politics in the Third Republic; in fact, it was published during the Fourth. After the war, he directed his attention to left-wing rather than conservative targets and renounced the crudeness of “Premier prix de comédie”, directly parodying 1930s politicians, for a more oblique approach and for his characteristic brand of fantasy. This starts from an absurd situation (the man, for example, who changes sex regularly twice a day), explores the logical, and therefore still more absurd, consequences (he falls in love with herself and vice versa), some further implications (their love is doomed, since they can never meet) and developments (they get pregnant), while gently poking fun at conventional responses to this incongruity (the real wife's “what will my parents say?”).

This does not provide the basis for hard social criticism or for very profound imaginative writing, and it runs the danger of whimsy which Aymé usually avoids by the vigour of his writing and the wry detachment of a narrator who has to record improbable or impossible events. There is a hint of coldness in his treatment of human beings and their relationships, and one suspects that if he appears most feeble when attempting direct political satire, it is because he did not care deeply enough about politics to be more than mildly unpleasant to politicians.

In any case, politics is about power, while Aymé's sympathies are with the little man. His characters, often with the generic name “Martin”, act against their better natures under the pressure of events: the dutiful chemist's assistant becomes a blackmailer, the sensitive doctor a mass murderer. The Martins remain what they always were, it is fate that is cruel. He turns from Martin to the biblical Samson to show that strength is a dubious blessing (“si tu faisais le compte de tout ce qu'il a brisé depuis qu'il est au monde, tu serais moins fier de sa force”, Samson's uncle complains): in Aymé's version of the story, Samson is a leader on whom God has imposed an unwanted burden. He plans his haircut as a return to normality and a rediscoverery of himself.

Aymé still enjoys a faithful readership twenty years after his death, as do other writers, such as Pierre MacOrlan, who celebrated the clerks and artisans of the lower middle-class, and their homes in small provincial towns or the “village” of Montmartre. The settings and the type may have lingered beyond the war, but both have since changed beyond recognition. Aymé explores what is now, increasingly, their nostalgic charm, and he occasionally reveals more than that: a perceptiveness about sexual relationships, a sardonic humour. All are represented in this collection.