FATALE
JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE (1942–1995) was a genreredefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, critic, and translator. Born in Marseille to a family of relatively modest means, Manchette grew up in a southwestern suburb of Paris, where he wrote from an early age. While a student of English literature at the Sorbonne, he contributed articles to the newspaper La Voix Communiste and became active in the national students’ union. In 1961 he married, and with his wife, Mélissa began translating American crime fiction—he would go on to translate the works of such writers as Donald Westlake, Ross Thomas, and Margaret Millar, often for Gallimard’s Série noire. Throughout the 1960s Manchette supported himself with various jobs, writing television scripts, screenplays, young-adult books, and film novelizations. In 1971 he published his first novel, a collaboration with Jean-Pierre Bastid, and embarked on his literary career in earnest, producing ten subsequent works over the course of the next two decades and establishing a new genre of French novel, the néo-polar (distinguished from the traditional detective novel, or polar, by its political engagement and social radicalism). During the 1980s, Manchette published celebrated translations of Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novels for a bandesdessinée publishing house co-founded by his son, Doug Headline. In addition to Fatale, Manchette’s novels Three to Kill and The Prone Gunman, as well as Jacques Tardi’s graphic-novel adaptations of them (titled West Coast Blues and Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot, respectively), are available in English.
DONALD NICHOLSON-SMITH’s translations of noir fiction include Manchette’s Three to Kill, Thierry Jonquet’s Mygale (a.k.a. Tarantula), and (with Alyson Waters) Yasmina Khadra’s Cousin K. He has also translated works by Guy Debord, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Antonin Artaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire. Born in Manchester, England, he is a longtime resident of New York City.
DAVID PEACE, named in 2003 as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, was born and brought up in Yorkshire. He is the author of the Red Riding Quartet (Nineteen Seventy Four, Nineteen Seventy Seven, Nineteen Eighty and Nineteen Eighty Three, originally published by Serpent’s Tail) which was adapted into a three-part Channel 4 series that aired in Spring 2009, GB84 which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and The Damned Utd, the film version of which (adapted by Peter Morgan and starring Michael Sheen) was released in Spring 2009. Tokyo Year Zero, the first part of his acclaimed Tokyo Trilogy, was published in 2007, and the second part, Occupied City, in 2009.
JEAN ECHENOZ is a prominent French novelist, many of whose works have been translated into English, among them Chopin’s Move (1989), Big Blondes (1995), and most recently Ravel (2008) and Running (2009).
FATALE
JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Foreword by David Peace
Afterword by
Jean Echenoz
The translator wishes to thank Robert Chasse, Doug Headline, Mia Rublowska, and Alyson W Waters for their precious assistance.
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request
The right of Jean-Patrick Manchette to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 1977, 1996 Editions Gallimard, Paris
Translation copyright © 2011 Donald Nicholson-Smith
Afterword copyright © 2011 Jean Echenoz
Foreword copyright © 2015 David Peace
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published as Fatale in 1977 by Editions Gallimard, Paris
First published in this translation in 2011 by New York Review Books, New York
First published in the UK in this edition in 2015 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London
WC1X 9HD
www.serpentstail.com
eISBN 978 1 78283 126 6
FOREWORD BY DAVID PEACE
Attack! Attack! Time is running short –
A Toast to Manchette
IN AUGUST 1980, in a homage to Dashiell Hammett entitled A Toast to Dash, Jean-Patrick Manchette declared Hammett “the best novelist in the world since 1920, and I can prove it”.
Well, I believe Jean-Patrick Manchette is one of the greatest writers since Dashiell Hammett, his only true son and heir, and I also believe I can prove it.
At the beginning of 1977, Jean-Patrick Manchette was thirty-four years old, the author of eight novels, all published by Gallimard in their Série Noire collection, and now writing his ninth, Fatale, under the title of La Belle Dame Sans Merci after the ballad by Keats. In his diary, Manchette already knows it will be a very short book, one he has “constantly sought to make as streamlined as possible”. Manchette also knows it will be a very different book from his previous novels, in every sense: “Done a completely crazy scene. The long quotation from Hegel is likely to drive the people at Série Noire totally bats. Ah, well!”
As always, Manchette was not wrong; at the end of April he writes, “Soulat [of Série Noire] phoned me just as I was trying to reach him, to tell me that he and his colleagues do not like LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI … This negative judgement clearly illustrates what I must never forget: I’m the only one with Melissa [Manchette’s wife] to understand what I am doing. All signs of understanding coming from outside are, a priori, hollow.”
The next day, April 30, 1977, on the back of this rejection, Manchette writes a “Memento about my intentions and my job as a writer”:
All in all, I’d rather contribute to the communist revolution. For now, I have not managed to develop an activity which does contribute to it. My intentions are only to entertain. My function is to show middle-class executives various things dressed as a spectacle, most notably dissatisfaction and violent reactions to dissatisfaction, such as those expressed by impatient or uneducated people (the young robber, the madman, the terrorist, etc.). One would have to be an airhead to conclude, from the fact that I use Marxist categories, Situationist categories, and other such categories in my interpretation of the world, and that they appear in my novels, that these novels then have a revolutionary function. In our time, the expression of revolutionary thought has to be Unitarian. The throngs of categories that appear in my books, more or less mismatched, do not form a revolutionary thought, no more there than when they appear in France-Soir, Le Monde, or [Jacques] Attali’s books. The extremism of my opinions does not change this state of things in the slightest way. I am not quite negative enough, so I am not at all, and I do not work quite enough, although I do work a lot.
A month later, Manchette was working again, on another book:
Another one that the Série Noire will not want, if I do write it to the end. Let them go to hell! They troubled me with their rejection of LA BELLE DAME, to the point that I was doing something quite uninteresting, of complete banality, with my story about the tired killer. I will get back to work on it, no doubt. But for now, I have to work against them, against their taste, if I want to get out of the malaise they have caused me. Attack! Attack! Time is running short!
Eventually, Gallimard did publish Fatale, not in Série Noire, but simply as a “regular novel”. However, the scars of the initial rejection are still visible three years later, in a letter Manchette wrote to a friend:
Have I really “explained” myself, about Fatale? The whole affair was put off-track because the book was turned down by the Série Noire. With the presentation and sales price it then acquired [as a trade paperback, with an illustrated cover, five or six times the price of a Série Noire pocketbook], it then became too short, too expensive, boring … but then I have to confess that I did not think I would turn out to be annoying for most readers, or would be rejected by the SN; I had embarked with enthusiasm in an attempt, so to speak, to try and desiccate the crime thriller as much as I could, this time by applying to my subject matter a very carefully crafted “Marxist” architecture (the anecdotal theme of Fatale is also, while the proletariat is still asleep, the affinity between a downgraded nihilist and an offshoot of the former ruling class, both at odds with the current ruling class; scholarship will recognize there, under another mantle, some aspects that Raoul Vaneigem has put forward in several of his texts on the bourgeois period as a world of division, taking its place between the unitary organization of the world that was feudalism, and another unified organization—yet to come—which will be harmonious communism) and then by undertaking my stylistic work in reference to Flaubert and his decadent offspring, especially J-K Huys-mans from whom I lifted and mimicked several passages: Because the style of nineteenth-century French realism is indeed the style of disillusion, which occurs when order is restored after the bourgeois revolutionary storm, and contrasts with the romantic enthusiasm initially induced by this storm, therefore working on this style seemed to me quite right for this subject matter. In addition to the literary imitations, the text is, finally, structured by political quotes, mostly three: Baron Jules’ speech at the telescope, on the transient character of bourgeois rule, which comes from an Engels’ article written after the Belgian bourgeois revolution; the Baron’s last words, extracted from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, essentially about individual criminal revolt, which therefore echoes the quote I used at the beginning of Nada [his third novel, from 1972]; finally of course the last sentence, which is by Sade, the only aristocratic rebel who ever proclaimed, in a convulsive but brilliant manner, the need to quickly move away from the bourgeois moment in order to rebuild a Unitarian world.
I do not do all this explaining to impress you, but rather to show, to illustrate, what I said in my first paragraph about my work. A car derives from the entire history of metallurgy and many other things; in the same way, a novel results from the history of literature and many other things.
But all this has not prevented Fatale from being annoying. So finally there is much truth in my provocative judgement. Indeed, since all these fine efforts and intelligent intentions have not interested anyone, the truth of Fatale lies only in the approval it received among literary reviewers, and which led a friend of mine, an editorial executive at the Série Noire, to say, “Your problem is that you have broken through now, you can publish anything, even crap, they will keep finding it great.”
Indeed, Fatale has met with a different reaction in the press than my previous SN novels, and we must admit that it is because of its presentation and price that it has stirred up the quality commentators, and not the crime fiction specialists … The uneducated and stupid recklessness of this whole crowd is simply revolting. So the value of Fatale resides only, at the very end, in the enthusiasm of these wretches. Therefore Fatale’s essence lies in provocation. And thus, finally, we agree.
Besides other things, The Gunman [Manchette’s tenth novel, originally published in English as The Prone Gunman] is determined by this very experience and wants to be, as it were, the opposite of Fatale: Non-stop mystery and violence, no stylistic references except to American Noir fiction, the formulas of which are so systematically anti-literary. As HK [a monthly magazine which was publishing The Gunman as an ongoing series, chapter by chapter, before it came out as a book] only publishes a part of it in each issue, its publication will probably take almost an entire year. But, benefitting from the multitude of violent events that are told in there, I organize each part in such a way that it has its own autonomy in terms of tension and shock. Unless it is rejected [by Série Noire], the thing should come out as a volume in six to eight months, but please rest assured it can be read month after month; it is also written to that purpose.
Once again, I do thank you for your cordial attitude, which drove me to all these explanations, and I extend my friendship.
Fatale and The Gunman [originally published in 1981] would be the last two novels published during Manchette’s lifetime. In the final fourteen years of his life, Manchette was working on a series of at least nine novels, a re-telling of world history from the post-war period right up to the 1990s, but of which only La Princesse du Sang has ever been published. However, Manchette also continued to keep his diary and to publish provocative criticism and essays. And in these writings, Manchette never loses sight either of the legacy or of the potential of the Roman Noir. And what he sees and what he writes here, particularly in regard to Hammett, remain relevant and true, not only for these great works of the past, but also for his own work and its legacy and relevance for us today.
In The Founding Fathers, his essay from 1978 on the origins of the Roman Noir, Manchette writes:
The mystery novel is the great moral literature of our era … The private eye is the great moral hero of that era. He is also a vein worth mining. Many have followed in the footsteps of Hammett and Chandler. Some have understood that it is his virtue that constitutes the grandeur of the private eye. Some haven’t …
These guys are moral I say. Now that the revolution has returned to the streets of the world, all of this stuff is fading away and we have the “new detective novel”. It isn’t as good as the old one but we’ll talk about it again one of these days …
In A Toast to Dash, Manchette continues:
When historical evil is the victor for a long period, the law of the heart can no longer assign itself any good end, and man has at his disposal only evil means. In the heart of the private eye, the law is reduced to an individual code of conduct, and this heart has hardened. Hammett’s heroes have only lying rotters to deal with; the pleasure they take in cleaning up a city or an affair is bitter, for the more they clean up, the more the general filthiness of the world appears. Every lie proved false reveals a worse lie, and finally the truth, which is worst of all. And Dashiell Hammett thus drank almost as much alcohol as his heroes. Nevertheless, his ways were haughty and elegant. You need that.
… Any appreciation of Hammett tends to be falsified, for the culture market, in developing with a panicked frenzy, valorizes everything, notably extra-artistic objects, in a crazed and indifferent manner. Detective novels, cartoons, Walt Disney, paintings by madmen and a thousand other things are touted with an equal promotional enthusiasm, under the imprudent pretext of consoling the oppressed creature. You and I know this well, at least I hope you do. In any case, we forget that the writings of Hammett and a few other authors were a necessary moment in the sighs and rages of the oppressed creature, a moment which has passed. The American Roman Noir, that is, in the first instance Hammett, completed its development long before the death of its founder. It delivered a negative judgement on literature and the entire society of its times. The affair of the present time is no longer this judgement, but rather its execution. Whoever now reads Dashiell Hammett with the simple pleasure of distraction should rather be frightened. For, to put it simply:
“This is why you will all die.”
Not only were Hammett and Manchette great writers—with their characters and their stories, in their language and their styles—they were Great RED Writers; men of the Left. And not what masquerades as left now, but the Left. And it was rare enough at the time Hammett was writing, rarer still when Manchette was writing, but now almost extinct. And it is then this very rarity—of being a Great Red Writer—that made first reading Manchette such a revelation for me; that here was someone who had seen the political potential of the “crime story” and had then actually fulfilled that potential, while never once compromising his stories or his style for manifestos and theories. And it is this quality, this union, which still serves as a constant inspiration; both sword and shield.
Of course, even in crime fiction, Hammett and Manchette are not alone on the left; there is Red-Handed: Anthology of Radical Crime Stories, as well as the works of Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Leonardo Sciascia, Seichō Matsumoto, Sjöwall & Wahlöö, Stieg Larsson, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Manuel Vasquez Montalban, to name just nine. But like Hammett before him, Manchette stands apart, further yet to the left, as extreme and as far as any writer has yet dared to stand.
Of the ten novels which were published during his lifetime, Fatale is as extreme and as far as Manchette went. Fatale throws down a gauntlet to any reader, and any writer. But if you believe this world is not good enough, but that it is worth fighting for, worth changing, then it is a challenge we cannot shirk and an example of what can and is to be done.
But Fatale, like the challenge, is not comfortable, not easy; it demands sacrifice, and insists upon struggle. On and off the page. For ultimately, as Manchette wrote in one of his final essays, The Roman Noir & Class Struggle, “the Roman Noir never hoped to clean up society. For this, it is necessary that men set themselves in motion.”
Documents, Sources & Further Reading
I am very grateful to Doug Headline, the son of Jean-Patrick Manchette, for all his friendship and help while I was preparing this piece, particularly for his own translations from the diaries and letters of his father.
On the www.marxistsfr.org website, there is a biography and archive of some of Manchette’s essays, and also an excerpt from his novel Nada. I am very grateful to have been able to quote from the following three essays, translated by Mitchell Abidor: The Founding Fathers, A Toast to Dash, and The Roman Noir & the Class Struggle.
Finally, of Manchette’s ten novels, the following four are available in English translations: The Mad and the Bad, Three to Kill, Fatale, and The Gunman.
These books are also available, under different titles, as graphic novels.
To my beloved