In the same way revisionist westerns no longer feel particularly subversive after years and years of influence in the genre, the revisionist noir “neo-polar” that Manchette pioneered has probably lost some of the edge it had back in the `70s. Good thing then that Manchette is funny as hell and has a knack for violent criminal prose unparalleled except by maybe James Ellroy.
Eugene Tarpon is a down on his luck guilty ex cop who takes a cakewalk job recommended by an old gendarme contact: old woman trying to find her blind daughter who eloped, humor her then move on with your life. Easy enough job, complicated by the little old lady getting her head blown straight off in the middle of a Parisian train station. A wild goose chase develops in a manner you would expect any noir story to do but the humorous tone really did set the novel apart from me, ive included an example below.
“CHARLOTTE who?” I asked after a moment.
“May I?”
He motioned toward the inside of his trench coat. I blinked.
“Slowly, now,” I said.
He gently slid a color Polaroid snapshot out of his inside pocket and held it out to me. In the photo, Charlotte was naked, tied and handcuffed to a metal chair that was bolted to a cement floor. In the field of vision, an anonymous hand was holding a copy of the day’s France-Soir. The date was not legible but the headlines—including SHOOTOUT IN LES HALLES—were clearly recognizable so that there was no question that the photo was as fresh as fresh bread. Charlotte was a bit disheveled and she’d been crying; there were traces of mascara running down her cheeks. Still, she was trying to put on a brave face. She didn’t appear to be wounded. I stared at Anvil Man.
“Slowly,” he said back to me.
“Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled clumsily, then added: “I’ve written a detailed letter to my lawyer. If you hurt that young woman, I promise you that all of France will hear about Fanch Tanguy.”
He nodded. “You’re complicating my life. It took me too long to find you. We’re going to have to resolve this business through negotiation.”
“Negotiation my ass,” I said with a vulgarity that wasn’t really my style. “You’re going to release Charlotte Malrakis.” (He smiled mockingly.) “Fine. What else do you have to offer?”
“You and the old guy in the house there” (he lifted his chin toward Haymann’s place) “are going to come with me. Now. I don’t have the authority to argue the point. I’m taking you somewhere where people will be able to discuss things with you. You’d be better off putting away your weapon. The neighbors will wind up noticing something and we don’t want to attract any attention, now do we?”
I didn’t respond. I tried to think. From his pocket, the Scandinavian Anvil Man delicately lifted out a tuft of brown hair and sort of dusted off my nose with it.
“I yanked it out,” he said, showing me the roots of the tuft. “If the negotiations haven’t begun by midnight, my colleagues have been instructed to saw off one of Charlotte Malrakis’s fingers. Until then, minor injuries to her will become more and more unavoidable as time goes by.”
I smacked him upside the head with the .45. He’d had no idea it was coming. A Colt .45 automatic weighs about three pounds. I knocked the guy out cold. He fell in the alleyway. I stuffed the .45 in my pocket, grabbed Anvil Man up by the ankles, and started towing him lickety-split. Haymann appeared out of nowhere and gave me a hand. We dragged him up the front stairs unceremoniously as his head bounced against the steps, and we hauled him to the middle of the living room. Haymann cast a worried glance through the curtains.
“My reputation in the neighborhood is already not so great. I hope no one saw us.”
“Nothing to do about it. Give me a hammer.”
But humor is not the only thing that I think is exemplary here. The title Skeletons in the Closet comes from a conversation Tarpon has with an old police contact explaining the nature of the conspiracy Tarpon has bumbled into:
You don’t know how the game is played. We’re among policemen, we’re among comrades, there are some things . . . Listen, the police are doing their job; and then small cliques form, because the work isn’t always clean, and so these cliques form among people who have the same skeleton in the same closet. You can understand that, can’t you, for God’s sake? And those on the outside of the clique know a little about what’s going on, but it stops there. No one even bothers to truly know who’s in and who’s out of the clique.
Of course, theres one skeleton that lies in the heart of postwar France that looms particularly large, that of collaboration. What turns out to be the the heart of the case is a swirl of corrupt cops and underground Nazi chemists are in league to make good money off of refining heroin under the disguise of monastery comprised by an obscure Russian sect, whose profits are laundered through charitanle societies for the blind. The unfortunate missing blind girl got too close to the conspiracy, and Tarpon was too duty driven in the way a man haunted by past mistakes can be to give up. In the end a shootout happens as they always do in these stories and Tarpon gets little but broken arms and kind of satisfaction of knocking down the ghosts of the past. Its not a great ending for him but in all honesty its the right one.
