Jacques Tardi/Fantagraphics A panel from Jacques Tardis comics adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchettes Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot. Another Tardi adaptation of Manchette, Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell, will be published by Fantagraphics in August.
In America it was Hammett and Chandler: Hammett who took murder out of the manor houses and gave it back to the people who actually commit it; Chandler who fashioned of bus stations, diners, and cheap hotel rooms, at the frontiers last raw edge, a mythology specifically American. In France the new maps were drawn by Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995).
When Manchette began to write his novels in the mid-1970s, the French polar had become a still pool of police procedurals and tales of Pigalle lowlife. Manchette wanted to throw in rocks, disturb the calm surface, bring up all the muck beneathto demonstrate that the crime novel could be (as he said again and again) the great moral literature of our time.
For Manchette and the generation of writers who succeeded him, then, these novels became far more than simple entertainment; they became a means of facing societys failures head on. One after another the curtains will be torn back. Pretense. Deceit. Manipulation. Till there in the small, choked room behind it all we witness societys true enginesgreed and violencegrinding away.
He was like an electroshock to the chloroformed country of literature and the French thriller, Jean-Franois Grault noted.
Manchette published ten novels with Gallimard from 1971 to 1982. Before and after, he worked as an editor, reviewed movies, wrote scripts for film and TV and numerous essays on thrillers and crime fiction. He also published translations of Ross Thomas, Donald Westlake, Alan Moore, and othersat least thirty books. By 1989, treatment of and complications from a pancreatic tumor made work difficult. He died in 1995 in Paris of lung cancer, aged fifty-three, before completing a new novel, La Princesse du sang (Princess of the Blood), intended to be the first of a five-book cycle covering five decades from the postwar period to the present.
The Mad and the Bad, original title dingos, chteaux!, came early in the game, in 1972, following close upon the prior years collaborative Laissez bronzer les cadavres (Corpses in the Sun, with Jean-Pierre Bastid) and solo LAffaire NGustro (The NGustro Affair), and won the grand prize for crime fiction in 1973.
The Mad and the Bads tale of a young woman and a boy set upon by deadly forces beyond their understanding shows the co-opting of classic noir plots that we see in all Manchettes novels. In Three to Kill a businessman witnesses a murder and, pursued by the killers, steps away from his ordinary life to turn the killing back on them. In The Prone Gunman a hired killer yearning to give it all up returns catastrophically to his hometown. The pleasure lies in the many ways Manchette twists and turns his story on the spit of plot, how he transforms the expected, how much weight he manages to pack into scenes that remain lean and muscular. Things move fast, almost at a blurthen excruciatingly slow. Sentences are clipped, headlong. Charged language everywhere, sometimes to the point of the incantatory.
Here also are Manchettes trademark disavowed individuals, ill-fitting stones in societal walls that will crumble at the first wayward blow.
The nursemaid before you. Completely off her rocker. Fifty if she was a day. And an idiot. What about you? Whats your thing?
See the rest here:
Manchette: Into the Muck