History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 7/10 · Translated from French

• Plot: A ragged group of anarchists kidnaps the American ambassador from a Paris brothel, and the state responds with overwhelming force.
• Clues: None in the usual sense; this is a crime novel about politics and violence, not detection.
• Reveal: A pitiless ending that condemns both the terrorists and the state.

A small group of revolutionaries, some ageing anarchists and some disaffected young people, plan to kidnap the US ambassador to France. They snatch him from a brothel and hide in a farmhouse. The police locate them. What follows is a massacre.

Jean-Patrick Manchette was the leading figure of the néo-polar, the French crime novels of the 1970s that used the genre for radical political critique. Nada is his manifesto. It is short, cold and violent, written in a flat, cinematic style that records actions without comment.

The novel’s politics are not simple. Manchette was a man of the far left, but he shows the revolutionaries as foolish, self-dramatising and doomed. The state, represented by a cynical police commissioner, is even worse, and the final confrontation is a demonstration of its capacity for violence.

The book’s influence was huge in France, and it anticipates the terrorism and state repression that marked Europe in the 1970s. Claude Chabrol filmed it in 1974.

The weakness is that the characters are hardly more than types, and the political dialogue can feel like pamphleteering. The book’s coldness keeps readers at a distance.

The 7 reflects a sharp, influential and disturbing novel. It is less accomplished than Manchette’s later Three to Kill, but it shows how a crime novel can be a political act.