René Belletto, the French writer whose crime and fantasy novels made his native Lyon a recurring character, has died at the age of 81. He died on Sunday, October 25, 2026, his publisher P.O.L announced. P.O.L published 22 of his books.
The Lyon trilogy
Belletto was not yet 30 when his short-story collection Le Temps mort won the Jean-Ray prize for fantasy literature in 1974. He broke through in the early 1980s with a loose trilogy set in Lyon that began with Le Revenant.
The second book, Sur la terre comme au ciel, won the Grand Prix de littérature policière in 1983. Director Michel Deville adapted it as the film Péril en la demeure and won the César for best director in 1986. The third, L’Enfer, won both the Prix Femina and the Prix du Livre Inter that same year.
Later work
His 1990 novel La Machine follows a psychiatrist who builds a device that moves one person’s mind into another’s body. It was adapted for the cinema with Nathalie Baye and Gérard Depardieu. He went on to write a trilogy about the police officer Michel Rey, whose final volume, Créature (2000), moved into science fiction. He also wrote the France 2 crime series Le Lyonnais (1990).
Life
Belletto was born in Lyon on September 11, 1945, and grew up in the Spanish quarter of Villeurbanne; his mother came from Almería in Andalusia. He taught literature and, for a time, the guitar, and wrote film criticism for the Lyon magazine Lyon-Poche between 1976 and 1982. A lifelong admirer of Johann Sebastian Bach, he devoted his last book to the composer, published by P.O.L in 2023.