Fatale (13 page)

This novel is
noir
enough, at any rate, for not a single note of music to make its way in. From Charlie Mingus or Gerry Mulligan in
L'Affaire N'Gustro
to Maria Callas and Bryan Ferry in
The Prone Gunman
, from Eugène Tarpon's perplexity about Chick Corea to the compositions specifically named in
Three to Kill
, all Jean-Patrick Manchette's other books have musical resonances. There is not a sign of them in
Fatale
. So little sign, in fact, that a drunk who appears fleetingly towards the end of the book in effect deplores the fact. But the darkness of
Fatale
stems above all from the way in which it eschews almost any political statement, whereas as a rule in Manchette's work the political is integral to the organization of the fiction. Here, aside from a few details—the electoral choices of the pathetic Sinistrat, the brisk description of the local newspapers (“one of them championed a left-capitalist ideology; the other championed a left-capitalist ideology”), or the Hegelian and Marxist ramblings of Baron Jules—
Fatale
is devoid of explicitly political content.

Or at least so it seems, for there is a sense in which the project of the heroine, Aimée Joubert, is a political one. A project of the most stripped-down form imaginable: to take money where it is to be found. It is the rich that interest Aimée; she goes only where there is money. In appropriating that money by taking advantage of the contradictions of its possessors, whom she eliminates in the process, she applies a radical and brutal logic which puts the death of the wealthy to profitable use. Curiously, though, despite the strongly utilitarian nature of her murders, she makes a point of clipping and saving the press reports.

On occasion Manchette liked to tell how once, when employed by a publisher to write brief blurbs, he adopted a strict rule: Whatever a work's content might be, he would invariably use the words “sex” and “money” in his description of it. In Aimée's Joubert's definition of her working method (in chapter 7), these two categories, in the same order, are what lead up to the act of killing.

The quantity of victims is impressive. Before Aimée Joubert comes to Bléville, where the greater part of the novel's action takes place, we learn by the bye that aside from her husband, an engineer, she has already killed seven men, among them a factory owner, a stock breeder, and a doctor. In Bléville itself she will eliminate another engineer, another doctor, a pharmacist, an idle nobleman, two more industrialists, and, indirectly, the wife of one of the industrialists. Thus, before her own demise, she clocks up a score of victims drawn from the petty, the middle, and the almost-big bourgeoisie, dispatching them variously by throat-slitting, strangulation, smothering, induced heart attack or suicide, hanging, drowning, stabbing, and shooting with 16-gauge and 12-gauge firearms. All methodically planned and executed homicides; Aimée, who takes care of her own training, has mastered all these techniques. Her targets include not a single member of the exploited classes—not one of those workers who, as Manchette makes clear by using capital letters, as Aimée drives through their suburbs at about four in the morning, are still sleeping
FOR JUST A WHILE LONGER
.

As so often with Manchette, women are more gently depicted than men. Manchette's men tend to be viewed (and this is especially true in the present work) only under their most repellent aspects. The only touching male character here is the déclassé Baron Jules, who is also the only one with the lucidity to foresee, after fifty pages or so, the end of the story: “You're all done for!” he cries. Indeed. But so is he.

And everyone dies alone. Aimée Joubert has lived alone and will die alone. We know of no earlier relationship of hers except for that with her husband. Twice we see her repel male advances with amusement, and the sole allusion to her sexuality is of an autoerotic kind. She is a solitary figure but a self-transformative one; it is as though she needed to be less alone with herself. For each of her operations, it seems, Aimée changes her appearance, her clothing, or the color of her hair, and she switches the brand of her cigarettes—Celtiques, Dunhills, mentholated Virginia—almost as readily as she does her surname. We see her roles and social attitudes proliferate even though we are never offered the slightest psychological interpretation. On the contrary, Manchette adopts a Dashiell Hammett–like behaviorism, confining himself to the most concrete indications of posture, attitude, or tone of voice. The personality and thoughts of the protagonist must be deduced only from their physical relationship to the world, their material interaction with objects. In Aimée's case this principle is infringed in one respect, twice: the one character trait of Aimée's that is specified is a love of crises, an infatuation with conflict.

Aimée will end badly, of course, and
Fatale
, the last
roman noir
but one to be published during Manchette's lifetime, falling chronologically between
Three to Kill
and
The Prone Gunman
, is first and foremost the account of a defeat. Yet this defeat of a woman seems much more valiant than the defeats of the men portrayed in the other two books. From the closed circle in which the mid-level manager Georges Gerfaut is trapped in
Three to Kill
to the vertiginous yet no less circular fate of the professional killer Martin Terrier in
The Prone Gunman
, Manchette's last two “heroes” rush headlong towards their downfall without hope of any kind. Aimée likewise rushes headlong towards her downfall, yet as she does so she constructs a self, she is engaged in
work
. “Mind you, this is work too, what I do,” she tells Baron Jules. And if she has what Martin Terrier calls a “life plan,” she will carry it out in a way far beyond the capacities of a Terrier. Of course she fails, and of course her life plan is also a death plan, but her failure is a form of self-realization. And thus the last sentence of the book, which apostrophizes “sensual women,” operates at once as an envoi, a warning, and perhaps even an exhortation.

Speaking in an interview of his first encounter with detective fiction, Jean-Patrick Manchette tells what a powerful impression reading Elliott Chaze's
Black Wings Has My Angel
at the age of eight or nine made on him. “The naked girl rolling around in banknotes after the holdup,” he says memorably, “was a pretty striking image for a prepubescent kid, and for me it was the ‘primal scene' in my development as a
polareux
[a crime-fiction fan].” Later in the interview, Manchette adds: “In the early days of my relationship with my beloved, realizing how knowledgeable she was about crime fiction, I described this scene that I remembered, and asked her did she know where it might be from. ‘Sure,' she answered. ‘It's from
Il gèle en enfer
[
Black Wings Has My Angel
]. I have a copy.'”

In Chaze's novel this scene, which is indeed startling, occurs quite early on—a “primal scene” that so marked the author of
Nada
that he took it as a kind of novel-matrix to be reproduced and elaborated upon here, in the second chapter of
Fatale.

It is not common for the name of the main character of a novel to be identical to that of the person to whom the work is dedicated. This is nevertheless the case with
Fatale
, which is dedicated to the person whom Manchette called his
bien-aimée
, his beloved, while its heroine is called, precisely, Aimée. Even though this identity is just one of several that the character assumes as she performs her sinister work, it is by this name that the author for his own part always chooses to refer to her. Manchette obviously has a soft spot for this type of murderess—just as he does, very often, for the other women in his novels: Julie Ballanger, Charlotte Malrakis, Ernestine Raguse, and others, sometimes involved in a certain intimacy with madness, more often entangled with obtuse men. Aimée's first name is meant to be taken at face value: Aimée Joubert loves nobody; that is how she operates, and the only time that she breaks this rule—with Baron Jules—it leads to her downfall. Her method consists in pleasing, in making herself loved before she kills.

Nor is it a common occurrence that an emblematic place-name, invented for the purposes of a novel, should, in reality, have another literary association. Yet this too is a characteristic of
Fatale
, whose action unfolds in a place called Bléville. Rather as with Dashiell Hammett, the reason for this choice is clear: Bléville means town of wheat, of dough, a town where—like everywhere else, but even more so—money rules. And this imaginary port town is where Aimée Joubert comes to practice her art. But it was also in Bléville, in the actual commune on the outskirts of Le Havre, that Raymond Queneau was baptized and later, in May 1914, that he took his first communion. Is there not something poignant about this odd geographical connection between two writers to whom some of us owe perhaps not everything, but almost everything?

“Whichever way you go,” writes Manchette, “there is a big hill to climb before you get out of Bléville.” In
Fatale
, as elsewhere in Manchette's books, we are liable to find such sentences freighted with strange metaphorical ambiguities. There is another one here too, which leaves us wondering whether it refers ironically to the bloody cleansing undertaken by Aimée or to the moral orderliness required for harmony to reign in Bléville. I refer to a simple injunction, a leitmotif written on weighing machines, public telephones, and municipal wastebaskets:
KEEP YOUR TOWN CLEAN
!

—J
EAN ECHENOZ

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

The translator wishes to thank Robert Chasse, Doug Headline, Mia Rublowska, and Alyson W. Waters for their precious assistance.

Copyright © 1977, 1996 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris

Translation copyright © 2011 by Donald Nicholson-Smith

Afterword copyright © by Jean Echenoz

All rights reserved.

Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme d'aide à la publication bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Service Culturel de l'Ambassade de France représenté aux Etats-Unis.
This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in the United States.

Cover photograph: Neil Krug,
Bonnie-6
, from
Pulp Art Book

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Manchette, Jean-Patrick, 1942–1995.

 [Fatale. English]

 Fatale / by Jean-Patrick Manchette ; introduction by Jean Echenoz ; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

   p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

 ISBN 978-1-59017-381-7 (alk. paper)

 I. Nicholson-Smith, Donald. II. Title.

 PQ2673.A452F313 2011

 843'.914—dc22

2010034848

eISBN 978-1-59017-572-9
v1.0

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit
www.nyrb.com
or write to:
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