Like the Brontes or James Joyce, Albert Camus doesn’t just have readers; he has fans. If his home town, Algiers, wasn’t torn apart by civil war, you would expect it to have a Camus tourism walk, ending up at a Camus brasserie. Meanwhile, his name features on one of those larky philosophy football T-shirts, with the slightly doctored quote, “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.” The notion persists that he played in goal for Algeria or even France (in fact, he was briefly on an Algiers junior team, before tuberculosis put an end to soccer-playing). A Camus website gives you a quote of the day. As I write, it is: “At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.”

More than four decades after he died in a car crash at 46, Camus remains a vivid figure. He was born on 7th November 1913. If he’d lived, he might this winter be a crusty 90-year-old great man of French literature, having revoked his earlier refusal to join the diehard Academie Francaise. As it is, he retains a youthful spirit of danger.

Thus, in discussing the film Young Adam, starring Ewan McGregor, the Guardian recently described Alexander Trocchi, the hard-bitten author of the 1957 novel it is based on, as “the Scottish Camus.” The Guardian also thought it significant that the favourite novel of the first man arrested on suspicion of murdering the Swedish foreign minister, Anna Lindh, was reportedly Camus’s L’Etranger (The Outsider). In photographs Camus often has a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. It’s a film noir image, which is no accident. Camus was devoted to Humphrey Bogart, especially his performance in The Big Sleep, and there were many approximations to Lauren Bacall in Camus’s life. He was delighted when one of his many mistresses, Arthur Koestler’s wife Mamaine, gave him a Burberry raincoat. He thought it made him even more like Bogart.

Camus’s first and best-known novel, L’Etranger, written in his twenties, is a short moral tale, in the tradition of Voltairean contes, about a meaningless (“absurd”) murder. Its flat short sentences have a permanent appeal to adolescent angst. It was first published by Gallimard in 1942, in a Paris under German occupation. L’Etranger is Gallimard’s all-time bestseller; the revenue helps them continue to dominate French literary publishing. Far more people read the novels of Camus than those of his contemporaries – friends, rivals and eventual enemies – Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. One grubby piece of evidence is Plateforme, a novel by France’s pornographer-in-chief Michel Houellebecq. This tale of sex tourism opens with a parody of L’Etranger’s plot and its deadpan, much-quoted first sentences: “Today my mother died. Or perhaps it was yesterday, I’m not sure.” Houellebecq’s anti-hero is called Renault; Camus’s outsider was “Meursault.” The clunky automobile cross-reference is intended to show, I suppose, how robotic western man has become since Camus became known, to his annoyance, as “existentialism’s No 2 man,” tagging along behind Sartre.

Camus was himself an outsider. Like the philosopher Jacques Derrida, he was Algerian-born. But Derrida was middle-class Jewish; Camus’s background was humbler: the white working class of Algiers. His father was a wine company foreman, killed on the Marne in 1914, eight months after his son’s birth. His mother, Spanish by origin, was illiterate and partly deaf. With her husband dead, she worked as a cleaner. Camus took his baths in a zinc tub, in a home without books.

The writer Geoff Dyer told an interviewer this year that he was happy to be thought of as a scholarship boy, “one of the big narratives of 20th-century writing,” in which he included DH Lawrence’s heroes, John Osborne’s angry young men and “Camus’s incredible journey up” to fame. France’s meritocratic schools system took young Albert first to an Algiers lycee (the so-called “Jewish” one), then to the local university, with vacation jobs in an ironmonger’s and a maritime broker’s.

For the settlers, in a province which was then administratively part of metropolitan France, Algeria was a Mediterranean California. Camus’s early writings are suffused with the charms of sun, sea and sand. The Algerians – meaning the settlers – were, he wrote in his early twenties, “a race without a past, without tradition and yet not without poetry.” The poetry largely consisted in “the cult of an admiration of the body.” Algiers was then a colonists’ city, with only 50,000 Arabs out of 220,000 inhabitants. Camus wrote dreamily about “the flowers and sports stadiums, the cool-legged girls.” When he began to write seriously he worried about keeping a “fragile” balance between work and sun-worship. Both L’Etranger and his other famous novel, La Peste (The Plague), are set in Algeria’s second city, Oran, and both are drenched in sun, even though he thought Oran grimmer than the capital: all “dust, pebbles and heat.” In La Peste, to go to the sea is, for the narrator Dr Rieux, the only respite from the epidemic which infests Oran. In L’Etranger, Meursault unemotionally picks up a new girlfriend on the beach; there, also, he kills the Arab for whose murder he is finally tried.

The clipped language of L’Etranger evokes the hardboiled style of James Cain’s Californian thrillers, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936). It’s a cinematic style, ready to be turned into a script. Young Algerians loved the new Hollywood talkies, whose popularity almost demolished the French film industry. The men and women modelled themselves, Camus noted, on Clark Gable or Marlene Dietrich. In later life, in Paris, Camus shared many French intellectuals’ suspicion of the US. But like them he was, at other levels, deeply influenced by America. He and Sartre both admired William Faulkner, whose Requiem for a Nun Camus adapted for the stage. (One French reviewer compared L’Etranger to Faulkner’s Sanctuary.) Camus, Sartre and friends would go along to Left Bank nightclubs to drink whisky, not wine, and listen to jazz.

In Algeria, Camus became, briefly, one of the province’s 150 communist party members. After university, he was an actor and director with the party’s theatre group; he remained devoted to the theatre all his life. But the party soon expelled him as “a Trotskyite agitator.” By the late 1930s he’d begun work on his precocious trilogy about the Absurd: the novel L’Etranger, a philosophical essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus) and a play Caligula. Journalistic work took him to Paris, with drafts or notes for all three in his luggage. The play was finished before war broke out in 1939, the novel before the fall of France in 1940, the essay by 1941.

Writers and publishers in occupied Paris danced a strange minuet with the Germans. Gallimard, for example, continued bringing out the prestigious literary journal La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, with a French Nazi as editor. The German censor, Gerhard Heller, approved L’Etranger for publication in 1942 as “asocial” and “apolitical.” In Le Mythe de Sisyphe, which ranges widely across philosophical and literary texts, Heller insisted only on removing a chapter on Kafka who, being a Jew, was unacceptable. It was duly cut. (In postwar editions it appears, unexplained, as an appendix.) A chapter on Dostoevsky appeared instead. And this was perhaps more apt. The essay labours to explain what we should do if the whole of existence is “absurd.” In the end, Camus suggests we should just work as well as we can at whatever we have to do: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” (Camus was no professional philosopher.) But, more forcefully, the essay confronts suicide and its justification; not an abstract question for a young man wracked with chronic TB. Here, and repeatedly in his writings, Camus is echoing Dostoevsky; in particular The Possessed, a novel which he said “has nourished me and educated me.” It is best known for its grimly comical parody of 19th-century would-be Russian revolutionaries. But suicide is a recurrent theme.

The third segment of the trilogy, Caligula, didn’t get its first performance until after the German occupation. It is full of analogies with Hitler and Stalin. When it was revived at London’s Donmar theatre in 2003, Michael Sheen turned the mad emperor into a cross between Titus Andronicus and James Cagney’s crazed gangster in White Heat, crying out as he died, “Made it, Ma, to the top of the world, Ma.” This Caligula is a man who feels “a violent need for impossible things”; who says, “I want to make suffering fun”; and who announces, “I decree that a famine starts tomorrow… I will stop it when I feel like it.”

Camus’s taste for moral fables means he is often compared with Orwell. They admired each other’s work and had friends like Koestler in common. The comparison with Orwell became closer after Camus published La Peste in 1947. He began work on this novel during the war, but broke off to edit the resistance newspaper Combat. The spread of plague through Oran, and the betrayals and compromises it brings, parallel French behaviour under the Germans. As the plague ebbs, Dr Rieux notes that this is no tale of “final victory” against “terror and its relentless onslaughts.” Watching the celebrations, “he knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good.” It only bides its time, as the first years of the 21st century have demonstrated.

In his long-running postwar battle with the French Communist party and its innumerable fellow travellers, Camus said, “It’s better to be wrong by killing no one than to be right with mass graves.” He constantly hoped to find a peaceful third way between socialism and capitalism. His suspicion of revolutionary motives – as set out in his 1949 Dostoevskian play Les Justes (The Just), about Russian conspirators, and his sarcastic 1951 essay L’Homme Révolté (“The Rebel”) – led to a never-healed quarrel with Sartre and his hangers-on.

Camus’s final years, and his reputation, were bedevilled by the Algerian war. He never went back to live in Algeria, but his ties ran deep; they were to the settlers, the so-called pieds noirs. The only Arab who plays a significant part in his writings is the man Meursault kills on the beach; we never even learn his name. Mostly the Arabs are silent, sometimes menacing, onlookers.

In 1954, after earlier rebellions had failed, the FLN (National Liberation Front) launched the Algerian war of independence. Both sides fought without quarter. French politicians – including the ineffable Francois Mitterrand, already a senior minister – said that Algeria would always be French; Sartre endorsed the FLN. The Arab nationalists were planting bombs in trams in Algiers, where Camus’s mother and his relatives still lived. Again he sought a third way, a goodwill truce between army, settlers and Arabs. This made him enemies on both left and right. Publicly, he retreated into silence. He wrote to the president of the republic, seeking clemency for Arabs he thought had been unjustly condemned to death. But he got form-letters back, and the executions went ahead.

He took refuge in theatre work. He adapted The Possessed for the stage. He spent more and more time in nightclubs with more and more women, often actresses. Le Mythe de Sisyphe had included a sympathetic chapter on the psychology of Don Juan; one of his favourite pieces of music was Don Giovanni. His wife, Francine, sank into depression and endured 23 bouts of electric shock treatment.

Algeria destroyed the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle came back from rural exile and created today’s republic; in 1962, he abandoned Algeria to the FLN. By then Camus was dead; in the interim, responses to his clemency letters came addressed to “Mon cher Maitre”; De Gaulle respected literary merit. In 1956 Camus had published his last completed novel, La Chute (The Fall), which some think his best. It is a soliloquy by a man trapped in doubts about his character and motives. A Frenchman in exile, he lives in the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. “The French have two passions,” he says, “having opinions and having sex.” This complex moral tale is suffused with Camus’s obsession with suicide, his regrets at failing to help his wife, his diminished role in public life, and his resistance to dogmatism. But it isn’t a self-pitying book.

In 1957, Camus was offered and accepted the Nobel prize. He retained the frugality of his youth, never travelling first class on trains. For the Stockholm ceremony, he borrowed a dinner jacket; Francine borrowed a mink stole. At a question and answer session with students, he was asked about Algeria. He said, “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.” From the left, Le Monde was delighted to give prominence to the quote.

Camus stands or falls by L’Etranger, La Peste and La Chute. But was he as wrong about Algeria as he seemed at the time? In his influential book, Orientalism (1978), the late Edward Said fingered Camus as “no friend of revolution” (very true); then, in 1993, in Culture and Imperialism, he went on to deride Camus’s “incapacitated colonial sensibility.” Things aren’t that simple. We’ve now seen the outcome of the FLN regime’s dogmatic, militaristic, even Stalinist rule. Twelve years ago, elections, which an Islamist party was about to win, were cancelled. Result: one of the cruellest of civil wars, even by African standards. South Africa, with its truth and reconciliation commission, shows that a third way may be possible.

Camus spent some of his Nobel money on a farmhouse in Provence, where he began a new novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man). In 1959, after Christmas in the farmhouse with his family, he wrote fond letters to his current mistresses – two actresses and a Balmain model – saying he’d soon be back. On 3rd January 1960, he accepted a lift in his publisher Michel Gallimard’s high-performance Facel Vega. The next day, after lunch, the car hit a roadside tree on the N5. Camus was killed instantly. In his briefcase were 144 pages of his draft novel, which was eventually published as he’d left it. It is about growing up as a poor white in Algeria.