This is one of two excellent French police novels recently published by Arcadia in their developing Eurocrime series. The other is Dominique Manotti's Rough Trade. One Helluva Mess is a translation of Total Cheops, Izzo's first (and best-selling) crime novel, published originally in France in 1995. Izzo, now sadly dead at age 55, sets his crime novels in his native Marseilles, where he was both poet and journalist.
One Helluva Mess is the story of Manu, Ugo and Fabio, once childhood friends in wrong-side-of-the-tracks, immigrant Marseilles. Fabio is now a disillusioned cop and Ugo is a hoodlum back in town to avenge the recent murder of Manu, assassins unknown. But Ugo winds up dead, killed by police after a tip-off. Are the two events connected? And what bearing does the brutal rape and slaughter of Leila, the young daughter of an Algerian immigrant have on the case?
Like Manotti, Izzo writes with urgency and realism, often using clipped, sometimes verbless sentences. But it is the more reflective novel, for Izzo can hardly contain his deep humanity and concern for the multi-racial, multi-cultural denizens of his beloved Marseilles. His book teems with life and he writes with a Mediterranean passion for women, sunlight and food, and with rage over the rise of the French National Front.
His 'hero' Inspector Fabio Montale, has a fondness for the company of women, loves chilled Cassis and Thelonius Monk, Lagavulin and Joseph Conrad. Working mainly in the high-rise suburbs of Marseilles, he was sometimes conscious that "it was easier to be a policeman than a criminal" and is continually aware, like his creator, of the local political realities that will always leave him at the sharp end of the stick.
The book seems well-translated on the whole, though like Rough Trade, there are problems with the dialogue. Here Vivienne Menkes-Ivry has chosen to render Izzo's Marseillais high-rise denizens in standard Thameside yob-speak. Fair enough I suppose, but it takes some getting used to.
A small price to pay, however. This is a life-loving, hard- hitting novel of a kind rare in UK crime fiction. And just why is that?