SOURCE: “Poor Little Martin,” in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4,445, June 10–16, 1988, p. 642.

In the following essay, Buss praises the stories collected in La Fille du shérif for their nostalgic insight into the French lower classes.

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 But apart from such puzzles, and one previously unpublished story for which Lecureur does not hazard a date, most of the pieces are traced to periodicals of the early 1930s and early 1950s, when the French social and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...