Fatale - Jean-Patrick Manchette [42]
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