Jean-Patrick Manchette © Jacques Robert

Manchette, nicknamed the French Chandler¹ or even better the Rimbaud of the polar² has, over time, become a cultural icon. Not only did he revitalise the French roman noir but he greatly transformed it, or perhaps more precisely radicalized the genre: “from the point of writing, through a concentration on linguistic style, and from the point of view of content, by the consequent politicization of themes.”³ Jean-Patrick Manchette, sympathetic to the radical left, joined the UNEF student group in 1960 and became a campaigner during the Algerian war. Then he was active at The Communist voice⁴ in Rouen, and finally, participated in the events of 1968. From 1965 he became more closely linked with the situationist group. Manchette worked as an English teacher. At the same time, he had begun to translate novels and essays and also to write screenplays and dialogues for both television and cinema. He translated 30 crime novels from English, some of them in collaboration with his wife.

Manchette did not begin his writing career earlier than his colleagues; however, he was published before them. It is perhaps for this reason that he is considered as a precursor and above all as the main writer who influenced the new genre. He opened the way for a generation of new authors who have not yet equalled his literary talent though some have tackled other themes or subjects in their fiction: Frédéric H. Fajardie, Didier Daeninckx, Jean- François Vilar, Thierry Jonquet, Jena-Bernard Pouy, Dominique Manotti and many others. Manchette anchored the roman noir in reality and never leaned towards nostalgia or romanticism, contrary to other authors. The picturesque descriptions of areas of Paris or Marseille that can be found in Le Breton or Simonin did not interest Manchette. Faithful to the revolt of ’68 his work is above all written as a challenge to the authorities. (“The first approach of an author of the roman noir is in fact to kill (symbolically) authority and its representatives: the father or the boss”⁵). In this way, his first novel L’Affaire N’Gusto⁶ that was published in 1971, exploded onto the literary scene: “The polar for me was, and remains, a novel of very violent social comment”⁷.

Manchette’s work ties in with the tradition of the American hardboiled fiction of the Twenties. Just like the Twenties, the counter revolution of the Seventies triumphed around the world and in this way revitalised the roman noir. However, this form of novel is only a substitute for revolution. Although it is difficult to rival the cynicism of Manchette’s novels, it is this attitude that always implicitly returns to the attempts of emancipation by the left and defends, as André Vanoncini has suggested, the moral certainties of May ’68⁸.

Manchette’s oeuvre not only consists of fiction but also of literary criticism, cinema criticism plus an essay on the theorizing of genre. Manchette wrote 10 roman noir novels. He portrays a generation of disappointed militants from ’68 in a way that nobody else has. This may explain why some traditional readers of crime fiction have rejected him. The extreme right journal, Minute, even reproached Manchette, in an article entitled “Is the Série noire going to disappear?”, for being responsible for the decline of the roman noir : “a certain left-wing bias of the salon (represented by) French authors like the mediocre and pretentious Jean-Patrick Manchette…(…)”. “These gentlemen lay claim to the anti-authority detective, hostile to the Vietnam war, and this excludes roman noir enthusiasts”⁹. Manchette found success quickly, however, because he succeeded in converting a new public to the roman noir as was suggested in an article in Le Monde in 1972: “The ultra left of the Série noire”¹⁰. Either way, what we can say is that from 1972 Manchette was an established author and able to make a living from his writing.

The real historical events: L’Affaire N’Gusto takes as its main theme the kidnapping of the Moroccan Al Medhi Ben Barka, a member of the opposition party. He fought for the independence of his country and was abducted on the 19th October 1965 in Paris by the Moroccan secret services, seemingly with the complicity of the French government, was then tortured and killed¹³. After independence in 1956 Ben Barka’s party, Istiqlal, split into two factions. A section agreed to share power, but the democratic section the Moroccan Union of popular forces refused to occupy ministerial posts. Ben Barka belonged to the latter section. He rapidly gained great popularity and because of this he was accused of having organised a plot against King Hassan II and so he went into voluntary exile. His assassination was orchestrated by the former Home Secretary, General Oufkir, who was in Paris on Saturday 30 October 1965. Ahmed Dlimi, the Directory of the Moroccan National Security Service, and a certain Chtouki, Head of the Moroccan Secret Service also happened to be in Paris at that time. In his enquiry, Commissioner Maurice Bouvier concluded that Ben Barka had been arrested by two French policemen, Louis Souchon and Roger Voitot. Ben Barka got into a car along with Antoine Lopez, a French secret service agent. He was driven to the villa of a man associated in the affair, Georges Bouchesiech in Fontenay-le-Vicomte (Essone). Here the trail runs cold. His body has still not been found. On 3 November the Moroccan Embassy gave an official reception in honour of their Home Secretary, Mohamed Oufkir, his French counterpart, Roger Frey and the former Police Chief, Maurice Papon (who also features as the ‘hero’ of another roman noir - Meurtres pour Mémoire - by Didier Daeninckx). Among the suspects were a journalist and a film director. Figon, the director, published his confession in the newspaper, L’Express, dated 10 January 1966: “I saw Ben Barka killed”. Figon confirmed having seen Oufkir kill the opposition member with a dagger from the collection of weapons at the aforementioned villa. By his portrayal of these events Manchette also signalled the transformational move from the traditional roman noir given that, as his colleague Paco Ignacio Taiblo II suggests: “The assassins are Home Office ministers, and police chiefs. It is them”¹⁴. Figon was found dead at home a short time after this, as Butron, Manchette’s main character. The French police concluded it was suicide and condemned Oufkir in absentia to life imprisonment. The judge Louis Zoillinger also convicted 12 other people. The sentencing of a foreign minister by the French judicial system, that had until then been a matter of international law, effectively froze Franco-Moroccan relations for 12 years.

In 1975, the son of Medhi Ben Barka lodged a new complaint. It was only in 1982 that the socialist government authorised M. Pinsseau, the judge presiding over the affair, to consult the documents of the SDECE (the former French secret service) concerning Ben Barka. The enquiry still remains open and, in the meantime, a number of people involved in this story have disappeared. Oufkir himself gave up the ghost on 16 August 1972. In 2003 it had been planned to erect a commemorative plaque by the Brasserie Lipp where the abduction had taken place, for which the Mayor of Paris had received a request. The representatives of the Green Party and the socialist mayor, M. Delanoë, had welcomed this¹⁵. On 18th April, the Paris city council decided to name a square near the Brasserie Lipp, Mehdi-Ben-Barka square. The representatives of the Gaullist UMP declined to vote on this.

The fictionalised version: apart from fictionalising the names of people (the Home Secretary is called Georges Clémenceau Oufiri) and the country concerned (Zimbabwe) Manchette sticks closely to the historical facts: “the documentary element, without which there is no good polar”¹⁶. “To tell it like it is”, as Michel Foucault put it, is also what motivates Manchette, and other authors who have followed his lead, to work on hitherto repressed historical events. He works in some ways like a historian, using trails that still exist for him to follow. In Manchette’s novel the opposition party too is divided into two sections. The history is narrated by a young fascist member of the OAS (the Algerian secret army opposed to Algerian independence), Henri Butron. It takes the form of an interior monologue. He records his confession on a cassette tape which will eventually be destroyed by the police. A large part of the story takes place in Rouen where Manchette began his militant fight against the Algerian war. Butron will be assassinated by the Zimbabwean secret services, the French police will make the killing look like a suicide and then destroy the cassette containing the confession as well as the photos taken by Butron during the kidnapping. One fact is particularly interesting: just like the massacre of hundreds of Algerians in Paris on 17th October 1961 which, amongst other things, inspired Didier Daeninckx, the Ben Barka affair had been hushed up for a long time, effectively becoming a taboo subject. In L’Affaire N’Gusto Manchette openly attacks the press for its complicity with the powers that be and its silence. Blasé and direct, he takes on Le Nouvel Observateur in his novel entitled Le Nouvel informateur.

Highlights: This unusual novel, where current affairs of the past still seem to be topical, already contains all the elements that have made Manchette’s style appear so direct: “The cheats of capitalist society, corrupt police, worthless left-wing journalists and intellectuals, a deliberately aggressive and provocative tone, a mixture of slang and a florid style, constant literary references”¹⁷. However, Manchette never again constructs bases the framework of his novels on actual historical events. Yet this does not mean though that he never makes any allusion to them in his 9 other novels but rather that he makes passing references or momentary highlights of such events. Historiography, a subject tacked by other roman noir authors after 1968, only appears in Manchette’s Que d’Os and the unfinished novel, La Princesse du sang¹⁸. At the end of his life, Manchette once again put History at the centre of his novels. At the beginning of the nineties, he planned to write a cycle of novels on the eighties: Les Gens du mauvais temps.

In Que d’Os¹⁹ Manchette takes the theme of collaboration and treats it in a burlesque manner. A former collaborator, now a drug dealer, has the daughter of his best friend kidnapped. The Jewish journalist, Hayman, helps Tarpon, an incompetent private detective, solve the case by offering him his knowledge of the German Occupation and Nazism. Unlike L’Affaire N’Gusto it does not deal with a concrete historical incident but crimes committed now (kidnapping and drug trafficking) which lead back to unresolved crimes in the past (collaboration). In La Princesse du sang, the main character is a young woman, the photographer Ivory Pearl, visits a British secret agent, Samuel Farakhan, who picked her up during the Second World war. This unfinished novel is a tour de force; a journey through world history. The anti-hero, Aaron Black, now an arms dealer, spent two years in Buchenwald. He was a member of the KPD (the German communist party) and had taken part in the Hamburg revolt where he was responsible for the distribution of arms. During the Algerian War, Black supplied arms to the rebels, whilst simultaneously working for the secret service. Researching a story about Black, Pearl is plunged into his incandescent past. From the start, this intrigue gives us an anti-hero who is a survivor of Nazism, a theme that Thierry Jonquet also takes up in Les Orpailleurs²⁰. Historical events are dealt with in a dialectical manner. In this way Manchette evokes the torture and enslavement of the former members of the resistance in the Algerian War without developing in detail any actual historical facts as in L’Affaire N’Gusto.

In what ways does the reading of the novels of Manchette make you more intelligent? Manchette’s very pessimistic analysis of society is based on the Marxist (and situationist) critique of the cultural industry that threatens those who contest modern society. He defined himself as a writer who made references to others, though these references are not always very evident. Manchette alluded to theorists (Debord, Trotsky, Hegel, Reich) and literary figures (Baudelaire, Leiris) in a patchwork manner, rather like Walter Benjamin did in Le Livre des Passages (Passagen-Werk). Manchette introduced fragmentation of action to maintain the reader’s attention: “Manchette’s is to awaken his reader, and to make him more lucid²¹”. Action is never dealt with in a linear manner in Manchette: in L’Affaire N’Gusto the hero dies at the beginning without the reader knowing why. Manchette wants to describe a milieu, an individual, who is involved in the extreme right, and wants to denounce the State rationale. “What’s more the novel overall is a barely-disguised true story”²².

Manchette writes in a behaviourist style, behaviourism being a particular psychological and social belief founded by the American, J. B Watson²³. He studied the behaviour of living beings and sought to discern their physical and social characteristics. Behaviourism is based on biology and limits itself to studying empiric and quantifiable human behaviour. Behaviour can also be interpreted as a result of a process of learning through a pattern of stimulus/response. This trend claims objectivity and has had a cultural influence on journalism and the cinema. In Manchette’s interpretation, behaviourism is opposed to unreal systems of representation, sentimentality or rhetoric and the laziness of the reader.

Manchette’s characters: They are broken anti-heroes, like Eugène Tarpon, a former policeman now a detective. He is incompetent, lacking culture and had to give up police work having inadvertently killed someone during a demonstration. In L’Affaire N’Gusto Butor, the first-person narrator, comes from a middle class family of doctors and he is bored with life: “I don’t give a damn about anything. I have an old banger and I have dough”²⁴. So he thinks he can manage to extract himself from the dangerous game in which he has become involved. However, he is only a simple pawn in a bigger game where the main protagonists are using him. They will get rid of him without any qualms. Just like Gerfaut, the anti-hero of Le Petit Bleu de la côté ouest, Buton is in the grips of an existential crisis. All Manchette’s heroes have not only lost their ideals but also their identity. Maybe this is the reason that they are, without exception, doomed to fail. In Manchette’s novels the existence of an individual is limited to his role in making the capitalist system function properly.

When it was published in 1977 Le Petit Bleu de la côté ouest seemed like a full frontal attack on capitalist society. Georges Gerfaut, a senior manager, married but unhappy because he has lost his ideals, is being pursued by killers. In this text, the critique of Marxist values reaches its height because the main character of the novel, Gerfaut, is nothing more than a toy in the hands of those in charge of the means of production. Cinematic adaptations of his novels, produced amongst others by Chabrol, have always been criticized or rejected by Manchette, faithful to the situationist tradition. In the Eighties, Manchette suffered writer’s block: “It seemed to me that we had fought in France, in Spain and been beaten in Portugal, fought in Italy and that the Polish movement was about to be trounced. In France in 1980 we had just elected a foul left-wing president who had already tried, but failed, to win in 1968. Finally this time he had succeeded. It was all over and we had entered the dark Eighties and I could no longer write”²⁵.

So to conclude, we can see that Manchette tackled all the important themes of 20th century history, and makes references to them. If we take just one example: L’Affaire N’Gusto, he (re)constructs a historical event which still remains to be clarified and given its true story. Manchette’s characters, with just about the sole exception of Tarpon, are pure anti-heroes.

Manchette: a seminal author of the roman noir in the Seventies, a genre that at that time he successfully revitalised and then re-examined as soon as he became established, remaining faithful to the situationist tradition. Manchette is also the person who, chronologically, was closest to the events of May 68 and who in 1976 still believed in the possibility of a social revolution like the one that had been expected in 68. In the absence of this revolution however a fundamental change took place in the French roman noir, a change initiated by Manchette. In the end, what is certain is that it was precisely Manchette, who refused to follow the established literary model and raised the literary level of the roman noir, thus establishing its integration into the realms of Literature.

1 Gérault, Jean-François: Jean-Patrick Manchette. Parcours d'une œuvre. Paris 2000. S. 6. | Back |
2 Gérault, S. 7. | Back |
3 Brenner, Rudolf: Die Entwicklung des modernen französischen Kriminalromans. In: Compart, Martin und Thomas Wörtche (Hrsg.): Krimijahrbuch 1990. Köln 1990. S. 102f. | Back |
4 A liberal Trotskyite newspaper. | Back |
5 Série Noire 1407 | Back |
6 Manchette, Jean-Patrick: Chroniques. Paris 1996. S. 12. | Back |
7 Vanoncini, André: Le Roman policier. Paris 2002. S. 104. | Back |
8 Minute, 20 mars 1974. | Back |
9 Le Monde, 7 décembre 1972. | Back |
10 Nada 1973 von Claude Chabrol, Folle à tuer 1975 von Yves Boisset, Trois hommes à abattre 1980 von Jacques Deray, Pour la peau d'un flic 1981 von Alain Delon, Le choc 1982 von Robin Davis und Polar 1983 von Jacques Bral. | Back |
11 Schweighaeuser, Jean-Paul: L'Affaire N'Gustro de Jean-Patrick Manchette. Fiche Roman n°54. In: Encrage n° 01/02/1986. S. 33f. | Back |
12 Vgl. Daoud, Zakya und Maâti Monjib: Ben Barka. Une vie, une mort. Mesnil-sur-l'Estrée 2000. 14 Derogy, Jacques und Frédéric Ploquin: Ils ont tué Ben Barka. Paris 1999. Guérin, Daniel: Les Assassins de Ben Barka. Dix ans d'enquête. Paris 1975 und 1982. Arnaud, Robert auf France Inter: L'affaire Ben Barka, Sonntag den 25. Oktober 2000. Perrault, Gilles: Notre ami le Roi. Paris 1990. Violet, Bernard: L'affaire Ben Barka. Paris 1995. Intervention de la famille de Medhi Ben Barka aux rassemblements du 29 octobre 2003. In: Yabiladi, 30.10.03. | Back |
13 Taibo II , Paco Ignacio. In: Du drapeau rouge au roman noir. S. 71. | Back|
14 En mai 2004, un ami, le journaliste Oliver Morel, était à la recherche de cette plaque commémorative. Il s’est rendu dans la brasserie Lipp et s’est renseigné. Les serveurs n’avaient jamais entendu le nom de Ben Barka mais ça rappelait toutefois quelque chose au gérant. Il demanda alors : « Ca n’aurait pas un rapport avec le terrorisme? » | Back |
15 Manchette, Jean-Patrick: Alive and kicking. "Polars", charlie mensuel n° 135, avril 1989. In: Chroniques, S. 122. | Back |
16 Gérault, S. 19. | Back |
17 Rivages Thriller 1996. | Back |
18 Super Noire 51, 1976. | Back |
19 Série Noire 2313, 1993. | Back |
20 Gérault, S. 57. | Back |
21 Gérault, S. 57. | Back |
22 J.B. Watson: Psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist. New York 1919. | Back |
23 Manchette: L'affaire N'Gustro. S. 91. | Back |
24 Manchette, Jean-Patrick. In: Du drapeau rouge au roman noir. L'œuf 1997. S. 63. | Back |
25 Manchette, Jean-Patrick: Cinq remarques sur mon gagne-pain. In: Les Nouvelles littéraires, décembre 1976. | Back |

	European crime fiction in the crosshairs

	n°2 July-August-September 2005