Three
to Kill by Jean Patrick Manchette
The Prone Gunman by Jean Patrick Manchette
In 1972, when the godfather of the French literary
crime genre, Gorges Simenon, published the last
of seventy books featuring his famous detective
Maigret, the genre was in desperate need of revitalisation.
A new prose style, crime fiction fit for the post-1968
world was required, and political activist Jean
Patrick Manchette provided it. Manchette wrote ten
novels between 1971 and 1982, but none were translated
into English until City Lights brought out Three
to Kill and The Prone Gunman in 2002. Now, for the
first time, both are available in the UK, twelve
years after the death of their creator. Like the
directors of the Nouvelle Vague, who influenced
by Hollywood film created a cinematic style all
of their own, Manchette took an American literary
genre, infused it with meaning, and gave it a cool
and unmistakably French edge. Manchette’s
prose style is like razor blades and ice, and the
slick talking heroes of Hammett and Chandler are
replaced with men without morality. In
Three to Kill, George Gerfaut stops to help an
injured motorist. Later, attacked by two hit men
whilst on holiday with his family, Gerfaut realises
that his act of compassion has set in motion a
chain of events, which jolt him out of his mundane
life and cast him in to a world of violence. At
heart, the story of an average man who finds himself
in an unusual situation, Manchette’s talent
for sticking firmly to the ‘what’
rather than the ‘why’, makes it a
deep and effecting exploration of the position
of man in an uncertain, indifferent world, without
moral or religious guidelines.
Martin
Terrier, The Prone Gunman of Manchette’s
last book, inhabits a completely different world
to the family man Gerfaut. He is an assassin,
who seemingly devoid of emotion and compassion
kills people for money, ending their lives with
an unthinking calmness. Terrier is trying to retire
so that he can marry the woman he fell in love
with a decade earlier, but his employers, not
wanting to lose their best employee, manage to
force him in to undertaking one last job. Full
to the brim with unthinking brutality and grim
reality, this book paints a picture of a man who
having entered a cold amoral world in order to
secure his future, finds that there is no future.
In a genre often condemned as lowbrow, Manchette
offers a thoroughly original perspective on the
human’s struggle to survive in a morally
ambiguous world that has outgrown all ideals.
Three
to Kill and The Prone Gunman are available now
from Serpents Tail, both priced £7.99.
Words by Gareth Rees
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