Giving Credibility to the Universe
“The .22 bullet tore a tiny hole into the canvas. The detonation was marginally louder than the crack of a whip. In the valley a crow protested. Luce emitted a short, husky laugh quite similar to the sound of the crow.” Thus begins Laissez bronzer les cadavres!, the first novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, the hilarious, hardboiled renovator of French crime literature whose work in (and about) literature and film I feted in Cinema Scope 62 on the unfortunate occasion of Pierre Morel’s 2015 “comeback” Manchette adaptation The Gunman. Co-written in 1971 with director Jean-Pierre Bastid after some of their film projects failed to get off the ground, and followed by nine slim, revolutionary Manchette novels over the next decade, Laissez bronzer les cadavres! has a tight, behaviourist style that may be inadequately rendered by my own translation from German (in the English-language world Manchette is still barely acknowledged, despite a few recent editions), but still may give an inkling of Manchette’s no-frills, blackly humorous approach. The revival he instigated characteristically came to be identified with a label he himself coined, with parodistic intentions: neopolar.
The novel’s stripped-down plot is rendered with exemplary economy, compressed in space and time. (There are countdown- like time annotations: the opening is preceded by the captions “Friday, July 16th—10:30.”) Gangsters Rhino, Gros, and Alex have made their way to a deserted cluster of dwell- ings on a hillside next to the sea in the south of France, the only residents two eccentric, once-acclaimed artists, painter Luce and her burned-out ex, writer Max Bernier. After ten pages, it’s 12:43 p.m. and the gangsters have successfully looted 250 kilos of gold from a transport truck on a nearby route, killing a couple of guards and cops in the process. The return to the hilly retreat is complicated by the unwanted presence of another trio: a fugitive wife, with son and nanny in tow, who accidentally leads two policemen to the premises. One is killed almost instantly, but the other, a stickler named Lambert, proves tenacious. Over the course of the night he fights a battle with the gangsters, with the indifferent yet increasingly bemused (and sauced) artists sniping from the sidelines, while their opportunistic lawyer pal Bisorgueil, who organized the whole scheme, tries to con his way out. By 6:30 a.m.,
