I Really Should Read This 19: Streets of Paris, Streets of Murder 1, by Manchette and Tardi

Streets of Paris, Streets of Murder 1, by Manchette and Tardi

1978, 2005, 1980, collected edition published in 2020

Now I have a new artist to buy everything from: Tardi.

I ordered this two-book slipcase Tardi collection in November, and had given up hope on it arriving. It was released in November, so I should have had it shortly after it came out, but it arrived last week, some five months later. 

Why did I buy it, other than the fact that I've been buying too much since I stopped going out due to a pandemic? The past year I've been filling in holes in my reading, and I figured I should know some Tardi. I've even read some in my life. I saw his work in RAW 25 years ago, and though it looked good, it didn't make a huge impression on me back then. I just felt like reading it though. The noir vibe was something I was in the mood for. And this book blew me away.

No, not like that

It collects three works authored by a French novelist, Jean-Patrick Manchette, and drawn by Tardi: Griffu, a detective story from 1978; West Coast Blues, a detective story without a detective from 2005; and Fatale, an unfinished story from 1980.

Just opening to the first pages, I was in love with how he rendered the city.

That car with one side over the curb in the second panel... it's stuff like that that gets me

His art manages a trick of that Disney animation can do so well: it's real without being realistic at all. There is a weight and mass to everything, but it is not rendered in an illusionary way. It's just ink on a page. I went through Griffu loving the art, and was surprised to see West Coast Blues appear in stark black and white, no grays. At first, I was thinking that the later work might be weaker in its illustration, looser, that the 25 years between the two stories had worn him down a little, but no, it's just different. Probably he spent a little less time with a ruler in the second story, but it's a masterfully drawn work.

Showing off by drawing three completely different car models

Griffu was a good story. Not incredible. I'm not a noir super fan, but I'm aware of the genre, and this is the sort of story like the Big Sleep or the Long Goodbye, where the detective bounces around the city getting little sleep, barely figuring out what is happening, and getting a lot of bruises.

Not such a nice lead character

It's written by an older established writer in 1980, so there are a lot of little racist nods in the story (for example, Griffu continues to call the hotel clerk Mohammed after the clerk corrects him that his name is Rasak). As a reader in 2021, I try to figure out if the writer is writing a character that is racist, if the writer is being racist himself, or if France in that period was, and I can't figure that out, and it's probably a bit of each. It's too much for me to dissect. It wasn't overwhelming anyway, just noticeably not something we'd likely see today. It did make me think about whether the hero of a story needs to be a "good guy." Griffu is not quite a good guy. I'd have a hard time even pinning down his motivation by the end of the story.

That first thought balloon made me laugh out loud

It's a winding story with a dark ending, and it was good, but I liked the art more than the story. It was a good story with great art.

That's a big phone. The panel layouts in this are gold. Bold, clear images bathed in shadow

The second story though, wow, it is flawless. I was riveted from start to finish, and it was about something. A frustrated man is out driving one night and rescues another man from a car accident. That man had been in an assassination attempt and the killers are sent to clean up the rescuer afterward. That's it, a story of a Good Samaritan being punished. The story spins away from there, without a clean, straight-forward plot. It goes unexpected places and has a strange resolution which works as a pulp story but works as something more introspective as well.

After, I thought about my own boring life. It was a great 80-page story. It's amazing what a writer can do with a limited number of pages. 

The rest of the book is a 21-page story called Fatale, that was originally going to be 60 pages. It sounds like an unsatisfying read, but those 21 pages are all set up. While there is no resolution, it ends up reading more like a character sketch than the first chapter of a book. And it has one of the more striking images I've seen in a comic in a while.

A happy person wouldn't do this

With the Ed Brubaker Criminal books, the Parker series, Stray Bullets and this, I think I am a noir fan. Either that or I'm just lucky to stick to the finer stories.

I have the second book of this waiting to go. I'm going to give it a few weeks so that it can all sink in better, but I'm excited to read it. And I'll have to start in on his World War I books after that. This is an expensive hobby.