A Narrative Nonfiction Project in Progress : When Certainty Replaces Verification

Quémeneur's house 

When Certainty Replaces Verification

In May 1923, a businessman, Pierre Quémeneur, vanished on a remote road in western France.His body was never recovered. The last person known to have seen him alive, Guillaume Seznec, was later accused of murder.

The case was never solved.

A year later, despite the absence of a body, a confession, or physical evidence, a French court sentenced the accused to life imprisonment. The verdict brought official closure to a mystery that, in many respects, had never been resolved.

When Certainty Replaces Verification is a work of narrative nonfiction that examines this century-old cold case—not to retry it, but to explore how a legal system decided it was finished asking questions.

The inquiry is conducted through the narrative figure of Albert Baker, an American judicial genealogist and professor of French, who encounters the case while working on an unrelated archival file. What draws his attention is not the disappearance itself, but a claim that quietly anchors the entire verdict: the categorical dismissal of a business deal the accused said he had been involved in shortly before the disappearance.

That deal was not disproven. It was declared impossible.

No court ever attempted to verify whether such a transaction—linking American surplus automobiles and Soviet Russia in the early 1920s—could plausibly have existed. Instead, its dismissal became the foundation on which the case was closed, and on which all subsequent interpretations came to rest.

As the investigation follows this assertion across judicial records, intelligence archives, and postwar administrative files, the scope expands beyond the crime itself. Two parallel inquiries emerge, conducted by the same state but governed by different logics: one seeking judicial closure, the other quietly tracking geopolitical and commercial realities that never entered the courtroom. These two lines of inquiry were never required to converge.

Rather than proposing a counter-theory of the crime, the book offers a structural portrait of how unresolved mysteries can be sealed by certainty—and how that certainty, once installed, can resist re-examination for generations.

When Certainty Replaces Verification is currently nearing completion. I am open to conversations with literary agents or editors interested in narrative nonfiction, investigative history, and transatlantic legal or institutional narratives.