The Pleasures of Crime (Page 2)

In his essay "The Guilty Vicarage," W.H. Auden described the reading of detective novels as "an addiction, like tobacco or alcohol." "If I have any work to do," he wrote, "I must be careful not to get hold of [one] for, once I begin one, I cannot work or sleep till I have finished it." Although he preferred his detective stories to take place in the English countryside, I can't help but think that Camilleri's novels would have caused Auden to procrastinate for at least a day or two.

I can't say the same for 3 to Kill and The Prone Gunman, two noir novels by the late French writer Jean-Patrick Manchette originally published in 1976 and 1981, respectively, and translated into English by City Lights. Manchette's protagonists aren't crime solvers, and his stories aren't page-turners in the conventional sense. Rather, his heroes are angst-ridden anti-heroes, his stories those of alienated men who unexpectedly find themselves with blood of their own, and others, on their hands. Manchette doesn't create suspense from mystery; we read to see whether our hero lives or dies.

Both The Prone Gunman and 3 to Kill are full of nasty, sadistic violence, leavened just enough by irony and black humor to be tolerable. The Prone Gunman's Martin Terrier is a career assassin, but one who took up his work only in order to make enough cash to marry Anne, his wealthy high school sweetheart; in 3 to Kill, Georges Gerfaut's efforts to hide from two men who are trying to kill him provide a convenient excuse to drop out of the bourgeois life and suburban comfort that had begun to depress him in middle age.

To call Manchette's style plain would be an understatement: It's French. Like Camus (himself an admirer of noir fiction, especially James Cain), he writes a cool and lean prose; each sentence exists only to advance from disaster to disaster, or to relay some painful moment from the past. Here's Manchette, writing in The Prone Gunman:

One Saturday evening when Anne had asked [Martin] to take her home after a party where they had danced to Miles Davis, she and he kissed violently.... She said that she found Martin much more colorful than the others, and she said that it was precisely because of his social background and because the others were spoiled children, but not him--he was acquainted with real-life problems, he worked in the summer instead of going on vacation, he had to struggle to elevate himself, and all that, she said finally, made him deeper and more mature.
   But when Martin slipped his tongue in her mouth, she seemed surprised.

Still, despite Martin's and Georges's aggressive, despicable behavior, willingness to murder and disdain for those who care about them, it's hard not to root for them. Their bloody triumphs provide a perverse kind of pleasure. The way Martin, once a wimpy, broken kid, outwits his pursuers makes him genuinely sexy, in that no-talk-all-action kind of way. When Georges quits whining about his life and takes control by killing a couple of thugs, it's both surprising and winning.

Ultimately, both Martin and Georges are just two men trying to figure out how, and what it means, to be happy. For Manchette, contentedness is found in a sort of asceticism; his characters feel most at peace once companions and things--especially money--have been cast aside. And they are, inevitably, when you have to live life on the run.

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