If Ndione's swirling linguistic play and Njami's minor (mis)translations open up the possibilities of African noir, Achille Ngoye's three novels, Agence Black Bafoussa (1996), Sorcellerie à bout portant (1998), and Ballet noir à Château-Rouge (2001), represent the first works of the mature Francophone African crime genre. All three appeared in the Série noire on which Himes had a significant generic influence, and this is evident in Ngoye's writing in different ways and to varying degrees; in particular, the Congolese author blends the American's use of the absurd while exploring in evolving fashion the aesthetic potentialities of a vernacular diasporic/African subculture. While some of the familiar tropes of the crime novel, such as speed, material culture, women, and violence, are present, these texts focus most intently on describing their urban worlds, experimenting with linguistic expectations, and making these textual forays communicate the fraught relationship between France and Africa while also maintaining the necessary distance and humor critical to the frivolous literary. Framed theoretically, Ngoye's novels play with and assess the ways in which the cultural and the political intersect under the banner of “Francophonie.” Agence Black Bafoussa recycles in absurdist fashion the French slang used to translate Himes; Sorcellerie à bout portant continues to experiment with literary representations of spoken language while revisiting the subject of Ngoye's first (non-noir) novel Kin-la-Joie, Kin-la Folie. Finally, Ballet noir à Château-Rouge fleshes out, through a linguistic emphasis, the possibility of a Parisianist crime fiction proposed by Njami's rewriting of Himes.