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A review by mattdube
Three to Kill by Jean-Patrick Manchette
4.0
This is a pretty pitch black roman noir, about a more-or-less regular Parisian salaryman who is targeted by two hitmen and the life journey that sends him on. It's gripping stuff, though by the time he's settled in the mountains, it's faintly comic. My brother and I disagree on this, but I think there's something intentionally comic in the hard-boiled sentences Manchette writes here, but maybe I've just been ruined by the Frank Millers of the world.
It's a taut little thriller, even if, like I suggested, the second act feels faintly silly. Manchette has a very detached style-- we get a lot of static detail about what people are wearing, some odd asides about music, even beyond his protagonist's exclusive musical interest in west coast jazz. There are strange asides to contempoary leftist politics, which the back cover tells me was an interest of Manchette's, and that was responsible for introducing as a valid topic in crime novels-- to me, it felt like he was taking the piss. But again, tone is really hard to read accurately. Manchette is not; if you want a black hearted thriller, you can do a lot worse.
It's a taut little thriller, even if, like I suggested, the second act feels faintly silly. Manchette has a very detached style-- we get a lot of static detail about what people are wearing, some odd asides about music, even beyond his protagonist's exclusive musical interest in west coast jazz. There are strange asides to contempoary leftist politics, which the back cover tells me was an interest of Manchette's, and that was responsible for introducing as a valid topic in crime novels-- to me, it felt like he was taking the piss. But again, tone is really hard to read accurately. Manchette is not; if you want a black hearted thriller, you can do a lot worse.