Fatale - Jean-Patrick Manchette [41]
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