Claude Jasmin

Claude Jasmin (10 November 1930 – 28 April 2021) was a Canadian journalist, broadcaster, and writer from Quebec.^[1]^[2]

While very prolific, with almost 50 published titles to his credit, he is most famous for his 1972 novel La Petite Patrie, an autobiographical novel about growing up in a working-class neighbourhood of Montreal in the 1940s. The novel served as the basis for a very popular television series on Radio-Canada which ran for two seasons from 1974 to 1976, and was adapted in graphic novel form in 2015. It is now considered a classic of Québécois literature, and the neighbourhood in which it is set has since been renamed "Rosemont-La Petite Patrie" in Jasmin's honour. He served as the screenwriter for the television adaptation of his novel, and later was the screenwriter for a number of other television series, many of which were based on his novels.

His start as a writer came as one of the pioneers of the crime novel genre in Quebec: his first novel, La corde au cou ("A rope around his neck", 1960) is about a remorseless killer, and he returned regularly to the genre over the years, including a series of novels featuring detective Charles Asselin in the 1980s. Several theatrical films were adapted from his novels, including Rope Around the Neck (La corde au cou)^[3] and Deliver Us from Evil (Délivrez-nous du mal).^[4]