Tue 9 Jul 2024
Reviewed by Tony Baer: JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE – Three to Kill.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE – Three to Kill. City Lights, paperback, 2002. Translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Also: A French crime film released in 1980 as Trois hommes à abattre (Three Men to Kill), directed by Jacques Deray, starring Alain Delon with Dalila Di Lazzaro, based on the novel Le Petit Bleu de la côte ouest by Jean-Patrick Manchette.
Georges Gerfaut is a middle sales manager for a tech firm. He’s doing pretty well, drives a Mercedes, has a pretty wife, nice kids.
He’s driving home on the highway and comes upon single car accident. The man in the car is bleeding. Gerfaut makes a split second decision. Do I stop? Or do I mind my own business and keep going.
He stops. He helps the injured driver into the back seat of the Mercedes and drops him off at the hospital.
Then he goes home.
What Gerfaut doesn’t know is that the man was not in a single car accident. Rather, the man was shot by hit men in a passing car.
Gerfaut takes his family on vacation at the beach. Once there, the assassins make an attempt on Gerfaut’s life, and try to drown him in the sea.
Gerfault goes on the run and tries to figure out what the hell is going on.
Once he gets his bearings and sees the score, there’s only three things to do. Kill the hitmen and the man who hired them. That makes three.
A brisk, stylish, suave little thriller.
July 9th, 2024 at 10:24 pm
Manchette’s Wikipedia page is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Patrick_Manchette
The first paragraph reads as follows:
“Jean-Patrick Manchette (19 December 1942, Marseille – 3 June 1995, Paris) was a French crime novelist credited with reinventing and reinvigorating the genre. He wrote ten short novels in the seventies and early eighties, and is widely recognized as the foremost French crime fiction author of that period. His stories are violent explorations of the human condition and French society. Manchette was politically to the left and his writing reflects this through his analysis of social positions and culture.”
July 9th, 2024 at 11:47 pm
I really like Manchette. NYRB has published several of his novels.
July 10th, 2024 at 8:37 am
I’ve read nearly all of his books that have been translated. This is definitely one of my favorites.
July 11th, 2024 at 6:14 am
The film is very good, with striking experimental touches, such as the car chase with intercut shots. Dalila Di Lazzaro establishes the stylized woman of the 80s.
July 13th, 2024 at 12:39 am
Manchette’s reputation as a writer went far beyond revitalizing the crime genre in Europe, he is a major figure in French letters, his works adapted not only in prose form, but graphic novels with cartoonist Jacques Tardi (THE ADVENTURES OF ADELE SEC BLANC) who also illustrated the Nestor Burma stories of Leo Malet.