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.

The Mad and the Bad works within a still pretty classic setup. It opens with a trademark Manchette bang: an English professional killer named Thompson (homage to writer Jim Thompson?) stabs his French target (“a pederast”) in the heart, pumping vigorously with “a rigid hacksaw blade mounted on a large cylindrical hilt with a circular sheet-metal guard” to sever the organ. Such technical detailing is Manchette’s way of establishing his character’s professional bona fides. Manchette will also, typically, note brand names throughout the narrative, to anchor it in contemporary commodity life. (Compare Ian Fleming’s tiresome luxe name-dropping for James Bond, which did provide a frisson for British readers still recovering from rationing.)

Thompson suffers from a severe gastric disorder. It will grow more gruesome and bile-spewing—monstrous—as the action unfolds.

We cut now to a mental hospital where the heroine, Julie Ballanger, a young woman with an anarchist past, is being discharged after five years to work as the companion to the orphaned six-year-old nephew of Michael Hartog, a powerful businessman-architect, a bachelor who philanthropically hires the disabled and the troubled.)  Quickly come almost Bunuelesque jolts: a hulking man mysteriously assaults Hartog on Julie’s arrival at the businessman-architect’s Parisian manor (le chateau un), then casually walks away. Julie meets the young nephew, Peter—who smashes a wooden dog into her nose, then heaves the toy into the TV set, exploding it, at which she slaps him hard in the face. Alone, Julie comforts herself with meds, brandy, and a King Oliver record.

Thompson now receives a new assignment.

Hartog departs on a trip. In his absence Julie and Peter are kidnapped and carted away deep into the countryside—where Thompson awaits, ostensibly to hold them for ransom.

Julie manages to escape with Peter, and the story unfolds into the primal thriller shape of a desperate flight to find safety—on foot (at one point Julie less than credibly hefts the drugged kid for hours through a wilderness) and by stolen car (Julie batters its leering driver unconscious)—with the murderous Thompson and his henchmen on their trail.

Along the way come more odd or sardonically over-the-top sequences. Julie ducks into a religious meeting, just, it seems, to heckle the preacher. Thompson and company blast away at the two escapees trying to hide inside a French temple of consumerism, a crowded Prisunic department store—products are gleefully described exploding on the shelves until the whole place bursts into a chaos of flames and screaming, stampeding crowds. Thompson is shown now satisfying his searing stomach by gorging, if you please, on live flapping fish, then a live chicken. (Who’s the real crazy, indeed.)

The denouement, at a location deep in the mountains, is a truly visceral grand guignol, featuring the demonic, retching Thompson whose “viscous pink spittle” is “left dangling behind him in repellent long strands” as he rushes to attack through the trees with the bloodthirsty figure who hired him. “His mucus shimmered as the sun rose higher.” A monstrous, perversely exquisite image.

The story’s precise gore fest of a climax finds only little Peter with his pathetic, childish bow and arrow trying to defend Julie and himself …

Well, I’ll break off there.

Manchette famously called crime writing “the great moral literature of our time.” In The Mad and the Bad  he violently tears open the rot by turbocharging Hammett’s lean tautness with a playfulness that’s audacious and harrowing.

Make that particularly audacious and harrowing.

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Barry Yourgrau's books of brief fiction include Wearing Dad’s Head, A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane, The Sadness of Sex (in whose film version he starred) and Haunted Traveler, as well as a memoir, Mess. He is the only American author who has published short fiction on Japanese cellphones (keitai shosetsu).

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