Missing Person (novel)

Missing Person

Author	Patrick Modiano
Original title	Rue des Boutiques Obscures
Translator	Daniel Weissbort
Country	France
Language	French
Published	1978 (Éditions Gallimard)
Published in English	1980 (Jonathan Cape)
Awards	Prix Goncourt
ISBN	(French 1st ed.) ISBN (English 1st ed.)

Missing Person (French: Rue des Boutiques Obscures) is the sixth novel by French writer Patrick Modiano, published on 5 September 1978. In the same year it was awarded the Prix Goncourt. The English translation by Daniel Weissbort was published in 1980. Rue des Boutiques Obscures (literally 'the Street of dark shops') is the name of a street in Rome () where one of the characters lived, and where Modiano himself lived for some time.

On 9 October 2014, Patrick Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Guy Roland is an amnesiac detective who lost his memory ten years before the beginning of the story, which opens in 1965. When his employer, Hutte, retires and closes the detective agency where he has worked for eight years, Roland embarks on a search for his own identity. His investigations uncover clues to a life that seems to stop during the Second World War. It seems that he is Jimmy Pedro Stern, a Greek Jew from Salonica, who was living in Paris under an assumed name, Pedro McEvoy, and working for the legation of the Dominican Republic. He and several friends (Denise Coudreuse, a French model who shares his life; Freddie Howard Luz, a British citizen originally from Mauritius; Gay Orlov, an American dancer of Russian origin; and André Wildmer, an English former jockey, all of whom are enemy nationals) went to Megève to escape a Paris that had become dangerous for them during the German occupation. Denise and Pedro attempted to flee to Switzerland, and paid a smuggler who abandoned them in the mountains, separating them and leaving them lost in the snow.