Good Book: You Shall Know Them, by Vercors

You Shall Know Them (a translation of Les animaux denatures) by Vercors, published in the U.S. in 1953 by Little, Brown and Company, Boston, was an attack of racism that also, as it happens, is a good read.

Vercors, more famous for publishing things during World War II that made the Nazis unhappy, set his sights in this book on the insanity of the mid-twentieth-century debates about whether black people were as fully human as white people.

So he illustrated absurdity with absurdity. Suffice it to say Vercors wrote a murder mystery in which the murderer happily confesses but the mystery that must be solved is whether the victim is human or animal. I cannot think what else I can say that won’t give away too much of the plot. Oh, well, I think it’s fair to mention that this book was also issued as The Murder of the Missing Link (Pocket, 1958). “The Murder of the Missing Link” is catchy, but not entirely accurate, as you will find if you read the book.

It also seems to have been published as Borderline by Macmillan in 1953, and New English Library in 1976. Hat tip: Jessica Amanda Salmonson at www.violetbooks.com/lostrace-check7.html for the various issue dates and publishers.

Vercors was the pen name of Jean Bruller.