Abdelilah Hamdouchi is the Moroccan crime writer who has has been the only one to break out in the English language. This, it must be noted, is largely due to a couple of small presses who have translated and published his work in English—London’s Arabia Books and Hoopoe Books, an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press.
Hamdouchi is originally from Meknès, now lives in Rabat and sets most of his novels in Casablanca. Most are police procedurals (almost all Moroccan crime writing is procedurals as private eyes have, until recently, been illegal in the country) and invariably feature world-weary long-serving cops adjusting to the new democratic Morocco where beating up suspects and mild torture techniques are no longer acceptable—something they usually only grudgingly accept.
Most of the novels (which feature different detectives) touch on issues of democracy and human rights interwoven with good murder mysteries. In The Final Bet (2001) a young Casablanca man is married to a much older French expatriot woman.
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