Arrived at the Bloody Streets of Paris!
When I finish the book, the review inevitably becomes a different matter. The ending becomes a bit of a disappointment. We get served the cleanest of resolutions. Everything in the sordid story of Parisians having to deal with the German occupation has a sound reason for being there. What seemed like random events were actually carefully orchestrated links in a perfectly gift-wrapped story. Every strand is conscientiously considered on a web made by a spider called fat convenience.
Another way of saying this is that it was filled with too many perfect coincidences made to provide connections to the array of unrelated occurrences needed. I get the sense that writer of the original novel, Leo Malet, did not have all the details of the crimes ready, and he started the book on interesting impressions that would tickle the reader with curiosity, but when he puts it together in the end, he reaches for some kind of plausible reasons. We don’t learn that coincidence after coincidence is the engine that runs this story throughout the many city blocks we are walking through in our foggy strolls through Lyon and Paris, until the roadmap is produced in the end.
Not only coincidences of the lead detective running into the right people but of him being at the right place at the right time to witness something that would help him later in the mystery. Burma finds the guy with the amnesia who eventually turns out to be someone he knew before the war started. That guy coincidentally bumps into the petty thief when the Germans capture them, and Burma a year and a half later bumps into the petty thief trying to break into his office at just the point in the story when he needed him to walk him through how he found the guy. The house the amnesiac used to live in was still conveniently abandoned. Everything was in its place, including the torture setup that was so important to Burma’s investigation. The petty thief starts to collect American cigarette butts all around that abandoned house, and that becomes an essential clue to the killer’s identity. This goes on and on, coincidences tying the chance meeting with the old colleague of Burma’s at the train station who gets shot before his eyes, when this colleague happens to spout out the same address that the amnesiac gives Burma in the Nazi stalag.
In a most ridiculous ending, the story even takes us through an Agatha Christie setting of the stage where the detective gathers all the participants we have met along the journey by inviting them to his apartment, and of course, they all show up. He goes through his own rendition of Poirot walking among all the suspects, making them nervous with some piece of incriminating evidence or other, after declaring, “Someone in this room committed the murder.”
When the murderer is found out, a shot rings in the room, but they catch him anyway, and we get the rest of the explanations along with the ludicrous idea behind why the actual murderer would show up to this get-together. Art Spiegelman, in the introduction to this book, mentioned the “trash” novel source from which this adaptation came from, and now I understood what he meant by it. It was hard-boiled, but unlike a Raymond Chandler novel, where the detective is not that superhuman and all the answers are not exposed in the end in a parlor room gathering. Even Chandler usually answers for too much. Mysteries are usually such a pleasure to read — until you get to the ending. I long for a mystery without all that perfect reasoning in the end. One that can’t answer for most things and just stares with longing into some setting wondering how it all went.
Story being a disappointment aside, the book is still a beauty! The original may be a trash novel, but the comics adaptation is such an ensemble of cuisine delights to reread and reread. It remains a travelogue that gives you this wise-cracking detective as a guide around the city of Lyon and then moments of Paris during a surreal time in France’s history. The sequences are well-balanced with interior monologue and moments of silence. And Jacques Tardi does pull this out of whatever stagnant story tropes it evolved from and makes it into something quite different, quite special.