When John Carroll Daly came along and shook up the mystery fiction field with "Three-Gun Terry" in the May 15, 1923 issue of Black Mask and with his series private eye, Race Williams, things changed quickly. Dashiell Hammett quickly followed with his Continental Operative stories, which eventually led to the creation of Sam Spade. The hard-boiled field was rapidly established. What would later become known as noir eventually grew out of this fertile groundwork.
Beginning with Daly, the elegant mystery story was thrown over by a fictive world full of brusque characters brimming with violence. There was a level of unexpectedness wheeling along pell-mell in these tales and in Hammett's stories. Famously emphasizing this element of the unexpected is the Flitcraft episode in The Maltese Falcon. Spade relates the story: A man named Flitcraft is walking along the street when a beam falls from a building and nearly strikes and kills him. Shaken by the occurrence, Flitcraft flees his present life, changes his name, and starts over. Spade, brought on to find the missing Flitcraft, found him -- in another city, with a similar job, similar wife, and so forth.
In Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers, Hammett's daughter recalls her father relating the story, "What I remember is his delight in the story -- as if it were a gift he had received that was just right. As a boy he had wanted to find the Ultimate Truth -- how the world operated. And here it was. There was no system except blind chance. Beams falling."
That's the way hard-boiled crime fiction operated, what made it fresh, before eventually formula took over in many instances. But Jean-Patrick Manchette stepped in and has re-injected crime writing with the unexpected again.
In doing so, Manchette (1942-1995) has revived a pulpish thrill in crime fiction. His 3 to Kill, recently translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith and published in English by City Lights Books, takes the Flitcraft episode as a sort of divine moment for crime fiction, and assaults characters right and left with a big bludgeon named The Unexpected.
Published originally in France as Le Petit Bleu de la Cote Ouest in 1976, the novel tells the story of Georges Gerfaut -- a sort of nobody-cum-Everyman, a middle-management type -- who suddenly finds himself the target of two hit men. The attacks are inexplicable to Gerfaut. In the middle of his holiday, he's attacked by two strangers and nearly drowned, while his wife and kids sun themselves on the beach, while other vacationers play in the surf, all oblivious to the homicidal attack taking place only a few yards away.
The assault leads to other deadly events and to Gerfaut's suddenly finding himself outside his old life, leading another life under another name. There is a touch of Hitchcock here: the normal, everyday guy suddenly caught up in a deadly enigma that coils about the surprised fellow until he decides to strike back and take control of his destiny.
And that's what happens to Gerfaut. Manchette tells his tale in a spare fashion, with a rapid pace that recalls the excitement-driven stories of the pulp masters. While Hammett's Flitcraft story-within-a-story seems the launching point for Gerfaut's adventures, the atmosphere is heavy with the noirish qualities that colored Raymond Chandler's pulp tales. Manchette has taken the lessons from the two early masters of the hard-boiled crime story, mixed with the road story, and revived them for the contemporary reader. English readers are fortunate that City Lights has made the effort to make Manchette's work available outside of France.
-submitted by Louis King Glass
3 to Kill is available from Amazon. Click here to learn more.
And Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers, by Josephine Hammett, is also available from Amazon. Click here.
Posted by ds at October 14, 2002 04:26 PM
CRAP!
Posted by: RUSSEL at February 16, 2004 08:45 AM
