A review by glenncolerussell
Three to Kill by Jean-Patrick Manchette

5.0

Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) – French crime novelist who revived the genre in France beginning in the 1970s with his super-cool style of extreme violence mixed with caustic social and political commentary.

In Elmore Leonard’s novel Tishomingo Blues, stunt diver Dennis Lenahan, an honest, straightlaced athlete, is practicing his stunt platform diving eighty feet above a pool of water behind a Tunica, Mississippi hotel when he witnesses a murder and is subsequently embroiled in the murky, deadly world of crime. It’s this clashing of two worlds that makes Leonard’s novel so compelling.

There's a similar dynamic in Three to Kill where Georges Gerfaut, an everyday kind of guy, a company manager, an engineer by education, through the simple act of providing aid to a victim of a car crash, becomes a prime target for two seasoned hit men.

I'm not giving anything away here since right up front in the first chapters we come across an example of Jean-Patrick's slick foreshadowing: “The attempt on Gerfaut’s life did not take place immediately, but it was not long in coming: just three days.”

The novel's rapid-fire action will bring to mind such films as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. And, oh, how music blares on radios and stereos, jazz and popular singers like Leonard Cohen, no big surprise, since jazz and popular music are kings in snazzy, hip 1970s France. And let’s recall Jean-Patrick Manchette was himself a jazz sax player.

Cars and guns also receive a special call out - for such a cool, new brand of crime fiction we have not just a red sedan but a Lancia Beta 1800, not just a target pistol but a SIG P210-5 9mm automatic. These souped-up objects pack a punch, provide the speed, add a dash of glamour and give the men and women in Manchette’s world an enhanced identity.

Even more than his jazz sax, let’s not forget Manchette was also involved in leftist Marxist politics prior to becoming a crime writer. His interest in politics, specifically the pitfalls and corrosiveness of capitalism comes through loud and clear. For example, one of the characters, a kingpin of killing from the Dominican Republic, was a leader in the military responsible for torturing and murdering peasants affiliated with the revolutionary leftist, anti-capitalists. The lesson to be learned: how money and power corrupt and quickly lead to violence, a way of dealing with problems that spills over into the general society where anyone can be the victim of an eruption of violence in the least likely of places, swimming among a crown at a beach or pumping gas at a service station.

In such a modern world, life imitates art, men and women continually envision themselves as a character in a work of contemporary fiction, or more usually, an American action film. This is exactly the case when Georges Gerfaut finds himself in a life-threatening predicament that reminds him both of a crime novel and a American Western. Such is life in the late twentieth century - images and memories are linked not with classical literature or lessons learned in school but with popular culture and the crustiness of the here and now. Thus, these great lines: “From an aesthetic point of view, the landscape was highly romantic. From Gerfaut’s point of view, it was absolute shit.”

Fortunately, the world still contains people who are not all about greed and ego – an old man helps Gerfaut not to be paid but for that good old-time feeling: compassion for another human being. On the other end of the spectrum, Gerfaut encounters a young lady who tells him, “When I was nineteen I married a surgeon. He was crazily in love with me, the moron. It was only a civil marriage. We were divorced after five years, and I took him for every penny I could get.”

We might think Manchette is making an observation about the older and younger generations but this would be short-sighted since there are other oldsters who exhibit a fair share of greed and ego and younger people who are kind. Perhaps this is the more accurate expression of the author’s philosophy: as powerful as social forces can be, we are still free to choose what type of people we become.

Life is rarely all black and white. Manchette captures the humanity of the two hit men, their squabbling, their fatigue, their suffering, even their tastes in food and reading material, the young one likes comics, especially Spiderman. And that kingpin of killing, Alonso, boss of the two hit men, has warm, fuzzy feelings for Elizabeth, his bull mastiff, occasionally giving her an extra helping of meat. Alonso also enjoys listening to Mendelssohn or Liszt and reads war novels by C.S. Forester when he isn’t looking at photos in Playboy and masturbating, mostly without success.

I can imagine many readers in France and elsewhere over the years have put themselves in Georges Gerfaut’s shoes. Even the meekest accountant-type has dreams of adventure and danger but, alas, the vast majority of middle-aged men (and women) are never attacked by hit men or take up automatic weapons to extract revenge against a killer. That’s the way it goes – at least they can read about Georges.

One last reflection. I read where critic Chris Morgan cites how Manchette would find today’s noir alien to his sensibilities since, to take one example, David Lynch's films are voyeuristic rather than crusading, viewing depravity at a safe distance rather than confronting such degrading behavior directly.

For Jean-Patrick Manchette, morality is a key to building a good society and his cool, violent novels served as his vehicle to wake people up to this truth.


Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995)