"The Mad and The Bad" by Jean-Patrick Manchette ****

• A New York Times Review of Books (NYRB) Classic
• French author
• Originally published in 1972, this translation published in 2014
• Vocabulary:
• demotic:  of or relating to the ordinary, everyday, current form of a language;vernacular
• nacelle:  the car of a balloon
• Quotes:
• p.162..."He did not clearly comprehend how his uncle had ended up on the side of the bad guys but since he had always detested the redhead the question did not strike him as of any great import.".....young Peter as he looked at the body of his dead uncle
• Introduction by James Sallis:
• Manchette created a new genre of French fiction...the "neo-polar", "distinguished from traditional detective novel, the "polar" by its political engagement and social radicalism."
• p.vii...."Manchette wanted to throw in rocks, disturb the calm surface, bring up all the muck beneath--to demonstrate that the crime novel could be (a he said again and again) 'the great moral literature of our time' ".
• p.vii..." 'He was like an electroshock to the chloroformed country of literature and the French thriller,' Jean-Francois Gerault noted."
• p.x...."...juxtaposes the vulgar and the precious, enjambs depictions of quotidian life against scenes of such extreme and often implicit violence as to call into question all the myriad fictions of bourgeois accepted existence."
• situationist:  believed that capitalism's overweening successes came only at the expense of increased alienation, social dysfunction and a general degradation of daily life; that the acquisition exchange and consumption of commodities had forcefully supplanted direct experience, creating a kind of life by proxy; and that liberation might be found in fashioning a parody of labor in capitalist society..."
• p.xii..."Back in the hills of the rural South where I grew up, squirrel hunters often nailed their game to trees and, with a knife and brute strength tore the body from the skin in a single hard pull  As a method it was clean, quick, and efficient.  The skins stayed behind on the trees, dozens of them, all around cabins and favorite hunting sites, constant reminders.  Books like Manchette's are those skins."......WOW
• Review:  You have to love it when the only character diagnosed as mentally ill turns out to be the only sane character in a book!  Jean-Patrick Manchette is referred to as the French version of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett.  This was my first experience with Manchette, and I am so impressed by his dynamic storytelling.  I always have to be careful discussing use of language when reading a translated piece of literature, but I really liked the language of this novel.. It is a violent tale highlighting the absurdity of the lifetime criminal, the pettiness of envy, and in some respects the naivete and purported resilience of children. Julie, the insane character, and Peter, a child in her care, are kidnapped and the criminal romp and killing spree go from there.  Sounds awful, but it reads very well, a tribute to the writer and translator!