Before Reaching the Bloody Streets of Paris
The Bloody Streets of Paris is a Jacques Tardi comic book book-length story that has not yet taken place in Paris because I am not done with it yet. I guess that action in the story will end up moving to Paris. The actual title in French is 120 Rue de Gare. It is an adaptation of a hardboiled French novel by a writer named Leo Malet.
It is set during World War II, where our hardboiled detective, Nestor Burma, is a prisoner of war at one of the Nazi stalags. There, he learns of a man that supposedly has amnesia. One of the inmates doesn’t buy it, thinks the guy is faking it in order to get a free pass back to Paris. One night, the guy dies but not before telling our detective about a woman named Helene and 120 Rue de Gare. And so begins this strange mystery that goes beyond its prisoner of war beginnings and ends up in the free city of Lyon, when Burma gets his pass to get out of the stalag. At a train station, he finds an old friend on the platform, and as they wave at each other, his friend yells “120 Rue de Gare,” before being shot several times in the back.
And our Burma is pulled into this circumstance — a mystery that involves a now-dead former colleague with a mysterious address that keeps coming up and a beautiful woman that looks like a famous movie actress who he spots at the scene of his friend’s murder. He is informally working with the police commissioner of Lyon, calling on old friends he knows in the city. He recruits the help of a reporter and a lawyer friend of his dead buddy. These three men of some acquaintance to one another even tear up the night with wine first, and then bottles of booze at a restaurant in a meandering night that feels so European — living the real life, even under these war conditions.
Lyon is an interesting setting because it is in unoccupied France. There are half-blackouts at night against possible bombings. It is a city that tries to retain order amidst the chaos of the Nazi invasion, and the blackouts and the strange mystery in front of Burma are doused in the city’s perpetual fog. As Burma keeps calling it, “this damn city.” We get many views of the city, sometimes in silent panels of a pensive Burma trying to figure out who could have killed his old colleague.
The caricatures Tardi makes of these various characters tells us so much about them. In one panel where the lawyer lights a cigarette and covers his face with it as he is leaning on the table is worth a few of sentences of prose. Later, he is driving Burma somewhere, and a cigarette is dangling from his mouth in such a way that is hard to even put together in words. The pictures, in fact, flow through the details of the story, and a reader needs to slow down to absorb these people and places and objects and interiors with greater care. After a series of pages, I would go back and scour the panels for such rich elaboration. If reading the novel, it would have been like scanning the descriptive paragraphs to get to the good parts and then at the end of a chapter, you go back to read the aspects offered for the settings and really draw yourself in. In other words, it wouldn’t have been very practical in that other medium. It may be the way most of us read comics, and it may very well be the greatest distinction between reading a novel and long-form comics. Most of us read the things that slow us down in prose but are disposed to merely glance at panels with no words in them.
I do make myself slow down, but I also go back to those pages I had already experienced, not so much to corroborate earlier information, but to take it in once more, walk through those lonely, obscure streets with Burma to hike through my own past explorations of other cities. I am reliving every Raymond Chandler novel I have read. And I am reminiscing on the art I used to see in my youth when flipping through kid magazines and watching certain cartoons in Tardi’s images.
A reader is purportedly filled with nostalgia. I don’t know how much I believe that. Yes, Tardi’s art touches on a few sensibilities from some past zeitgeist, but it is far more subtle than just that. His line is that tight clean kind you get with a bowl-tipped pen nib (and I assume this because those were the lines I would get from it when experimenting with various dip pens). He uses a grainy pencil to indicate the foggy parts. He marries his photo references with his signature caricatures in panels that blend with the story. No reader can take that in if they were casually flying through the pages, focusing on mostly the words. No such casual reader would appreciate Tardi’s characteristics if they were purely just there to get to the end of this yarn. Such a work of art needs the reader’s engagement.
Unlike the proverbial page-turner, which according to the public is the way to go for “successful” books, the books that really have something to say or to show may impose a speed on you. Certain works can only be read slowly because the makeup of their sentences dictates a slower, more methodical read if you are even going to understand them. I am now thinking of The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, which showcases sentences that had never existed before.
With comics, the conventional way to slow things down is to inundate panels with captions and thought balloons of verbiage. The reader needs to take the pacing of a string of wordless panels into their circle. Myself, I like to chew on things a little longer, especially when they are this good! It may be that I am reading this book too slowly, but I rue the day I no longer have to look forward to reading Tardi’s rendition of this story. So, I am prolonging it, taking sips of this book a few pages a night, like I swish wine around when it tastes good. Drinking wine is hardly ever about getting a buzz. It is about making the most of that bottle you have opened and cannot unopen. The time is right now, but how I will regret when the last drop, the last page, my final thought on such a stroll through the past has left its mark!