1939 to Josette Baudin. Narcjeac was married twice--in 1930 to Marie Thérèse Baret, with whom he had two daughters, Annette et Jacqueline, and in 1967 to Renée Swanson. Writing style Narcejac, who was the team's stylist and theoretician, wrote: "I felt that the best kind of detective novel could not be written by any one person, since it involved the improbable blending, in a single individual, of two opposite personalities: the technician’s and the psychologist’s." He pointed out that the success of their collaboration lies in the fact that Boileau "was interested in the 'hows' and I was interested in the 'whys' of a story." Boileau and Narcejac were exponents of what they termed "le roman de la victime" ("the victim novel") which may be defined as a suspense novel that adopts the victim's point of view. "Boileau-Narcejac characters typically have character traits which make them susceptible and vulnerable, and they find themselves in situations under pressure. The more they resist, the greater the pressure, and the more inevitable their eventual fate. The situation in question may take the reader into the realms of the fantastic or supernatural before a final twist reveals the workings of some criminal machination. By which time it may be too late for the victim, and the reader should have been drawn into a climate of unease, disorientation, and angst. This is a constant in Boileau-Narcejac’s work, a formula which realizes suspense through the rhythmic combination of retention and release…" François Guérif notes that the team's brand of psychological suspense was inspired by Cornell Woolrich but remarks that the latter's victim characters are always sympathetic which is not always the case with Boileau-Narcejac. The editors of World Authors, 1950-1970 wrote that Boileau-Narcejac's novels "reflect Narcejac's admiration for Simenon in their compelling use of atmosphere but have none of the scrupulous naturalism of the Maigret stories." They also said that the duo's work "at least in translation, is stylistically undistinguished, but for most critics this fact is outweighed by the ingenuity of their plots and their power to involve the reader in the mood of doubt and mounting fear that they so skillfully evoke." Legacy While their contemporaries in the late 1940s and 1950s were fascinated by an imaginary America, Boileau and Narcejac are credited with having helped to form an authentically French subgenre of crime fiction. They emphasized local settings and stressed the psychological dimension