Three To Kill by
Jean Patrick Manchette
pbk out February 07
(Serpent's Tail)
at £7.99
Imagine you are Georges Gerfaut, a quiet salesman, and suddenly two hired
killers are on your tail trying to murder you. Imagine you are Jean-Patrick Manchette,
writer of pulp novels dying at 53 of lung cancer. Either scenario could only be imagined
in a French existentialist context. Except one is real and the other a work of the
imagination of the first. Manchette wrote ten short novels in the 70s and 80s in the style
of pulp fiction, or 'polar' as it is known in France. Their content is full of meaning – an
examination of society's failings, and an individual's personal motivation.
At the beginning, Gerfaut is driving fast round the Paris outer ring road listening
to jazz. He has killed two men. Alonso Emerich y Emerich is a solitary villain with a
dark South American past. He lives alone in a vast villa guarded by hit men. How do the
lives of these men intersect? We will find out. Gerfaut is driving home at night when he
sees a car wreck. He stops to assist the driver, and takes him to a hospital. He leaves the
hospital without giving his name. He returns home to his wife, Bea, and his children, and
all seems normal. But when they go on holiday, there is an attempt on Gerfaut's life, and
his safe existence falls apart. He flees his family, and is drawn into another world. His
Samaritan act has doomed him in some way. His only way out finally is to fight back.
The story is noir, littered with references to books, jazz music and films. It is not
by chance that on holiday his children want to watch 'Pickup on South Street' – a classic
1953 film noir by Samuel Fuller. Gerfaut's life unrolls against a background of persistent
social unrest and strikes. This is only seen fleetingly, as though out the corner of the
reader's eye. But it leaves us with a sense of its stark reality. Gerfaut's new world
plunges through the real world almost at a tangent, until he is drawn back to it only by an
unimaginable change in his behaviour. Has it affected him? Undoubtedly. Has it
changed him? Probably. But he can find no other way ahead than by pulling on his old
life again, and wrapping it around him. Manchette's writing is lean, cool, and terse, and
carries a message that demands deep thought. This is pulp fiction with style and
meaning.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
New Books by Jean Patrick Manchette at Amazon.co.uk
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Three To Kill by
Jean Patrick Manchette
