REVIEWED BY TONY BAER:

   

JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE – The Mad and the Bad. ‎ NYRB Classics, paperback, July 2014. Translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Introduction by James Sallis. First published in 1972 as O dingos, O chateaux! Winner of the French Grand Prix of crime fiction for the year 1973.

   A super rich couple dies when their private plane flies into a mountain.

   The husband’s brother, a failed architect, inherits their young bratty son and their fortune.

   The fortune is cool. Who wouldn’t want a fortune?

Now all the architectural plans that nobody liked can finally be built!

   But the brat! What to do with the brat?

   He hatches a brilliant idea!

   He’ll start a foundation as a philanthropist for people with disabilities.

   Hire help, but only conspicuously with impairments: A chef with epilepsy; a valet with one arm; a wounded veteran chauffeur.

   Ahh. And the coup de grace: a nanny with bipolar disorder. Freshly released from a five-year stint of psychiatric hospitalization following arson.

   Ohhhh. It’s gonna be so sad. ‘The philanthropist was just trying to be philanthropic!’ That’s what they’ll say!

   Who could blame him?

   How was he supposed to know that the nanny would go manic, kidnap the kid, and then riddled with remorse, hang the kid and then herself?

   It’ll be so sad.

   So so sad.

   But how to make sure it happens that way?

   Well, better hire a world-renowned dyspeptic hitman. He’ll be sure to get ’er done. Make it look just right.

         ———

   Unfortunately for them, the ‘bad’ have grossly underestimated the ‘mad’. The nanny is hell to deal with off her meds.

   Escaping the initial assassination attempt, “[w]ith a dead branch she drew a large heart in the sand in front of her, and inside it she wrote: HERE LIVED… THE RABID BITCH.…. She pictured men flirting with her — and her shooting them point-blank. I must be in a manic phase, she told herself.”

   Dashing thru France, a scorched trail of destruction in their wake, go the nanny and child, and the hitman.

         ——–

   Terrific, brisk, cinematic short novel. At dizzying speed, 163 pages might as well be 163 mph.

   Manchette, Hammett acolyte, shows you rather than tells you. You feel it thru the visceral description of the action and the surroundings. You rarely hear anyone’s thoughts. You feel fear because the circumstances are frightening. Not because a character tells you they are afraid. Be very afraid.

   Highly recommended.