Review: Barry Yourgrau on Jean-Patrick Manchette

Manchette used the crime thriller to skewer capitalist culture’s sedating distractions

Jean-Patrick Manchette was the writer who in the seventies and early eighties transformed the French crime thriller into what he dubbed the “neo-polar” (“polar” being short for “roman policier”)—by jolting it beyond its by-then stale terrain of gangsters, cops, heists, and Pigalle joints. A hardcore leftie from early on, a man of 1968 and its convulsions, he juiced the genre with social and political consciousness. What’s more he was influenced by Guy Debord and the Situationists, whose blend of Marxism and Surrealism taunted and pranked—aimed to disrupt—capitalist culture and its sedating distractions and fetishes.

Manchette died aged fifty-two in 1995. His short career was an ode to hyper-production as he churned out multiple compact novels, innumerable film and TV scripts and adaptations (his early ambition was to be a screenwriter), translations of some thirty works from English (he was erudite on classic American noir), criticism of film and crime writing, texts for bandes dessinées (cartoons), a couple of children’s books, plus a diary that ran to five thousand pages. He was also a huge jazz buff and played the saxophone.

Hammett and Chandler were Manchette’s models—writers who dwelled on the violent rot of society’s pillars, its powers that be, not just tangled stories of blackmail, murder, and femmes fatales. It was Hammett’s “behaviorist” style Manchette emulated, focusing on action (not interiority) in the lean prose manner of Red Harvest and The Continental Op, to which he added flashes of sardonic humor and mayhem. Not for him Chandler’s gaudy similes (“he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake”) and snappy wisecracking (dark cousin of screwball repartee).

Manchette’s most well-known neo-polars in English translation are The Prone Gunman (1981, made into a Hollywood mess with Sean Penn and Javier Bardem), Fatale (1977), and Three to Kill (1976, admired by Rachel Kushner). All are memorable. But I want to tout here the achievement of The Mad and the Bad (1972),Manchette’s third novel (his second solo effort, ably translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith), which won France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. In French the title is O Dingos, O Chateaux, meaning “O Crazies, O Castles,” dingo being a slang conversion of “dingue,” crazy.

Who (and what) are the the crazies, we will see.