Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  Morse falls hopelessly in love, yet, as is invariably the case for the poor soul, his love is in vain. He and Lewis chase a healthy shoal of red herrings and Morse exclaims a few times, “Lewis, you’re a genius!” without Lewis having the slightest clue as to what he may have said to kick-start Morse’s labyrinthine imagination.

  Morse follows Dexter’s lead in his love of crossword puzzles and his passion for the works of Wagner and A. E. Housman. Dexter, through Morse, makes clear early in his first book how fastidious, and witty, he intends to be in the usage of the English language.

  “Yes, a witness, sir. A Mrs. Mabel Jarman. She saw the murdered girl . . . ”

  “You mean,” interrupted Morse, “she saw the girl who was later murdered, I suppose.”

  Morse, while explaining his approach to detective work to Lewis, says, “They tell me you can climb the Eiger in your carpet slippers if you go the easy way.”

  In the early books Lewis was Welsh, middle-aged, older than Morse by several years, balding, and overweight. For the television adaptation (and the Morse novels that came after the TV series began broadcasting) he became a Geordie, thick-haired, slimmer, and younger than Morse by several years. The Lancia of the pre-TV novels was replaced by the scene-stealing maroon Jaguar XJ6 Mk II (registration number 248 RPA). For the television films, John Thaw (apparently) insisted Morse lose his leanings for seedier locations and lustful dalliances.

  The main trio behind the TV films—Colin Dexter, Ted Childs, and John Thaw—all appeared to be simultaneously hitting their creative peaks in their respective fields. We had Dexter’s well-drawn characters and clever plotting; executive producer Ted Childs’s brave, innovative idea of holding out for the precious two-hour slots on prime-time television, and his insistence on rotating several screenwriters and directors in order to keep the thirty-three TV films fresh; and, finally, John Thaw in the role that it appeared he’d been waiting his entire life to play. I mean, with hindsight it really couldn’t have failed, could it? Morse—the TV series—was so successful that it brought British detective fiction in general and Colin Dexter in particular into the publishing and media mainstream. So much so, in fact, that the final two Dexter books—Death Is Now My Neighbour, where Morse’s Christian name is revealed, and The Remorseful Day—were covered in depth by all the U.K. national media, including frequent mentions on the TV and radio news bulletins. Both titles ruled the best-seller lists for ages.

  As a writer Colin Dexter never suffers from a blank page or screen (although I don’t believe that he’s ever written using any method other than pen and ink). “You never wait for the Almighty to whisper in your ear,” he says. His logic is you just put two people on a page, they start a dialogue, and you have the start of your scene or story. He concedes that the initial result might be terrible but his point is that, when you have something down on the page, you at least have a chance of making it better.

  Dexter’s books are essentially puzzles. He once said that he was as anxious for the detective to manage without a pathology lab as he was for the crossword puzzler to manage without a dictionary. Dexter is not scared of dropping clues aplenty and of allowing world-weary Morse to be completely in the wrong, or to have his head turned by a beautiful woman. He infuses his work with the happiness and humor, the sadness and misery, of real life. Lewis is never confident and clearly never capable of leading a case, but at the same time he’s the perfect foil and sounding board for Morse, even though it’s often a one-way conversation.

  There are some great writers of crime fiction out there but few seem as capable as Dexter—or Michael Connelly—of catching the kaleidoscope of real life. Dexter’s eye for detail, his understanding of human nature, and his ear for dialogue immediately pull you right into the thick of his story. He hooks you in such a way that you don’t even know you’ve been hooked. He is clearly concerned with making his pages easy to read. He loves to break up the physical density of print on the page with dialogue. His chapters are short and snappy and the books are over all too soon. There is just such pleasure to be taken in the actual reading of his work, even before you consider his trademark twists, turns, and red herrings that come together in one almighty wallop at the end of the book.

  In the case of an anthology like this one, I suppose that one has to give a balanced view and offer some kind of criticism. So, after very careful consideration, my main criticism would have to be that, unfortunately, Colin Dexter limited us to only a mere thirteen classic Morse mysteries, plus one volume of collected Morse short stories. I do thank the editors for the excuse to read them again. I can happily report that they’re standing the test of time perfectly.

  Paul Charles was born and raised in the Northern Irish countryside. He is the author of the acclaimed Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy series. The most recent title—A Pleasure to Do Death With You —is the tenth in the series. He is also the author of a couple of music-related novels, namely First of the True Believers (2002), which uses the story of the Beatles as a backdrop, and The Last Dance (2012), set in the legendary Irish Showband scene of the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Charles may be unique in that not only was he around in the 1960s, but he also remembers the decade vividly. Visit him online at www.paulcharlesbooks.com.

  3 to Kill (Le petit bleu de la côte ouest)

  by Jean-Patrick Manchette (1976)

  JAMES SALLIS

  * * *

  Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–95) was a French writer of short, violent crime novels who translated American crime fiction, including the work of Donald Westlake and Ross Thomas, into French as well as producing crime fiction of his own. Manchette, who was a student activist and a contributor to the newspaper La Voix Communiste, is credited with the invention of the néo-polar, a politically and socially engaged version of the traditional French polar, or detective novel. “Just as one must never leave the critique of fascism to democrats,” he once remarked in an essay, “the critique of democracy must not be abandoned to cretins.”

  * * *

  Warn your children and the weak of heart. There is meat here. There is gristle. There is bone.

  If they’re about anything at all beyond mere entertainment, the arts are about amazement and recognition. Certain paintings, poems, books, and music seem somehow to be in our blood, braided into the DNA: from our first encounter they’re a part of us. That’s precisely how I felt upon initially hearing Mozart’s horn concerti and the blues or, years later, Cajun music, or when I fetched up on those first lines of Apollinaire, Cendrars, Queneau.

  Asked about my devotion to crime fiction by interviewers or by audience members at speaking engagements, I tell them that’s the way crime fiction was for me: a crucial part of my intellectual history, amazingly a familiar part, from the moment I first cracked open The Maltese Falcon. Then, after blathering on about mysteries being the quintessential urban fiction, quoting Nathanael West to the effect that in America the novelist has no need to prepare for violence, or citing D. H. Lawrence’s observation that Americans have murdered their way into democracy, like any good hunting dog I come to point.

  Quite often these days, the game in the bush tends to be Jean-Patrick Manchette.

  Each era, I suspect, fumbles its way to a distinctive popular voice, some form uniquely suited to the time’s self-image, its deeper needs and anxieties. Victorian England had its “penny dreadfuls,” the United States in the placid 1950s had those subterranean original paperbacks by such writers as Richard Matheson, David Goodis, and Jim Thompson. As Geoffrey O’Brien observed in Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks, “These novels, and the covers that illustrate them, speak of the ignoble corners of life beyond the glow of Jane Powell, Father Knows Best, and the healthy, smiling faces in magazines advertising milk or frozen dinners or trips to California.”

  Increasingly I’ve come to wonder if the thriller—massive engines set in motion and grinding on far beyond our tiny lives and ken, provisional realities imploding page by page,
horizontal rather than vertical thrust—may not best define and serve our time.

  France, of course, adopted American crime fiction early on, giving the genre literary cachet and spilling out to the world at large a defining word, “noir,” with publication of works by Hammett, Chandler, Himes, and their French-born disciples in Gallimard’s La Série noire. Writers largely forgotten here, such as Horace McCoy, W. R. Burnett, and others, remain well known there. In France thrillers are referred to as polars. And in France the godfather and wizard of polars is Jean-Patrick Manchette.

  Much about Manchette seems quintessentially French: the stylish glistening surface of his prose, his objectivist method, his adoption of a “low” art form to embody abstract ideas. This may go far toward explaining why he remains virtually unknown in the States, with but three of his books available in translation and those largely, it would seem, unread. In Europe, having salvaged the French crime novel from the bog of police procedurals and colorful tales of Pigalle lowlife into which it had sunk, Manchette is a massive figure.

  I have vivid memories of standing with the Mexican writer and novelist Paco Taibo on a veranda at a conference in the Bahamas going on and on about Manchette. Heavyweights of crime writing were there: editors, critics, writers. But each time we were joined, because so few knew his work, Paco and I had to start over.

  “The crime novel,” Manchette claimed, “is the great moral literature of our time”—and he set about proving it.

  For Manchette, and for the generation of writers that followed him, the crime novel is no mere entertainment, but a means to strip bare the failures of society, ripping through veils of appearance, deceit, and manipulation to expose to the air the greed and violence that are society’s true engines.

  Coming from the extreme left as an advocate of Guy Debord’s Situationism, Manchette consistently skewered capitalist society and indicted the media for its emphasis on spectacle. He saw the world as a giant marketplace in which gangs of thugs—be they leftist, terrorist, or socially approved stand-ins such as police and politicians—compete relentlessly, and in which tiny groups of alienated individuals go on trying to cling to the flotsam of their lives. He folds quotations, allusions, and parodies of literary writers like Stendhal and Baudelaire into his work, alludes constantly to music, painting, and philosophy, juxtaposes the vulgar and the precious, jams depictions of quotidian life against scenes of such extreme violence as to call into question the whole of bourgeois—of accepted, apparent, innocent—existence.

  “He was like an electroshock to the chloroformed country of literature and the French thriller,” Jean-François Gérault wrote. (Take note of that “and.”) Elsewhere Gérault suggested that Manchette “had reached a formal perfection that was impossible to surpass.”

  Effectively Manchette’s career ran only some eleven years or so. The ten novels were published by Gallimard from 1971 to 1982. Following this, he worked as a translator (of Ross Thomas, Donald Westlake, and Alan Moore, among others), as a scenarist for film and TV, as an editor, as a reviewer of films, and an essayist on thrillers and crime fiction. After 1989, treatment of, and complications from, a pancreatic tumor made work impossible. He died in 1995 in Paris of lung cancer, aged fifty-three.

  From the first page of 3 to Kill, from virtually any page of Manchette, you know right away that you’re in the hands of a master, that the safe, predictable carnival ride for which you’ve paid has become more like plunging headlong and helpless down rapids.

  And sometimes what used to happen was what is happening now: Georges Gerfaut is driving on Paris’s outer ring road. He has entered at the Porte d’Ivry. It is two-thirty or maybe three-fifteen in the morning . . . He has had five glasses of Four Roses bourbon. And about three hours ago he took two capsules of a powerful barbiturate. The combined effect on him has not been drowsiness but a tense euphoria that threatens at any moment to change into anger or else into a kind of vaguely Chekhovian and essentially bitter melancholy, not a very valiant or interesting feeling . . .

  Georges Gerfaut is a man under forty. His car is a steel-grey Mercedes. The leather upholstery is mahogany brown, matching all the fittings of the vehicle’s interior. As for Georges Gerfaut’s interior, it is somber and confused . . . Via two speakers, one beneath the dashboard, the other on the back-window deck, a tape player is quietly diffusing West Coast–style jazz . . .

  The reason why Georges is barreling along the outer ring road, with diminished reflexes, listening to this particular music, must be sought first and foremost in the position occupied by Georges in the social relations of production. The fact that Georges has killed at least two men in the course of the last year is not germane. What is happening now used to happen from time to time in the past.

  One is never on safe ground with Manchette, as here we’re immediately off-kilter and off-balance, often unsure just where in the story we find ourselves—in medias res, flashback, reverie, or trapped in some sort of eternal recurrence?

  Stopping to aid a severely injured man, Gerfaut attracts the attention of the man’s attackers. They then set upon Gerfaut who, at first failing to connect the two incidents, nonetheless steps aside and out of his own life to turn the killing back on them. A standard thriller plot, the pursued becoming pursuer: the amazement is in seeing how much of the world’s confusion, savagery, and sideways comedy Manchette effortlessly loops and lassos into his novel.

  Here is the opening of The Prone Gunman:

  It was winter, and it was dark. Coming down directly from the Arctic, a freezing wind rushed into the Irish Sea, swept through Liverpool, raced across the Cheshire plain (where the cats lowered their trembling ears at the sound of the roaring in the chimneys) and, through the lowered window, struck the eyes of the man sitting in the little Bedford van. The man did not blink.

  He was tall but not really massive, with a calm face, blue eyes and brown hair . . . An Ortgies automatic pistol with a Redfield silencer rested on his lap.

  Another standard, archetypical plot: the hired killer who wants to give it all up. Again, the pleasure is in seeing how many ways Manchette can twist and turn his story on the spit of that plot, how much weight he manages to pack into scenes that appear on the surface to be purely objective, the gravity of it all. Things move fast, almost at a blur—then excruciatingly slow. Sentences are clipped, breathless. Charged language everywhere, sometimes to the point of the incantatory.

  We are there, and flayed. With Manchette we drive the ring road about Paris again and again. We are calm. We have an automatic pistol in our lap. Its weight is the weight of history. Gristle here—and bone, shining beneath the light.

  Jean-Patrick Manchette’s are lean, muscular books that deserve serious reading. In this age of hyperbole and unremitting puffery, our age, they have the uncommon decency and grace to appear much simpler than they are: to mean much more than they say.

  They have grace.

  Best known perhaps for the Lew Griffin books and Drive, James Sallis has published fourteen novels, more than a hundred stories, collections of poetry, a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin, three books on music, and reams of criticism on literature of every sort. Once editor of the landmark science-fiction magazine New Worlds in London (“Way, way back in the day”), Jim contributes a regular books column to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Visit him online at www.jamessallis.com.

  Touch Not the Cat

  by Mary Stewart (1976)

  M. J. ROSE

  * * *

  Mary Stewart (b. 1916) is an English novelist known for her work in the field of romantic suspense, with gothic undertones, and for her five-book sequence of Arthurian novels, published between 1970 and 1995, that blurred the lines between historical and fantasy fiction. The first three novels in the series— The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, and The Last Enchantment—are generally referred to as the Merlin Trilogy.

  * * *

  My lover came to me on the last night in April, with
a message and a warning that sent me home to him.

  So begins Touch Not the Cat by Mary Stewart. The opening quote refers to a message delivered telepathically to Bryony Ashley, aged twenty-two, by an unknown lover whom she has always believed would eventually reveal himself. She receives this communication on the eve of her father’s death. He’s been killed in a mysterious automobile accident far from home. As a result, ownership of her family home, Ashley Court, has passed via trust to Emory, her cousin.

  The ensuing story is true to the mores of the gothic genre. As the jacket copy describes the plot, it all begins with an inheritance:

  At first, Bryony feels relief that she has not inherited the responsibility of the Court. She knows that she possesses the true Ashley legacy: the “gift.” Three hundred years ago that gift was called “The Sight,” and had caused an Ashley ancestor to be burned at the stake. Today Bryony calls it the gift of telepathy, and she is also aware that at least one of the other Ashley [cousins] has this gift.

  Throughout the years this strange telepathic communication has led Bryony to think of this other Ashley as her “phantom lover.” The intimate relationship with this lover is complete in every way but one: the physical.

  Alone after her father’s death, Bryony resolves to discover who that secret lover is, and decipher a dying message left by her father that mentions a cat. Is it the animal on the family crest in the gazebo that centuries of Ashleys used for illicit assignations? Or was he alluding to the American woman trying to seduce Emory?