Arrived at the Bloody Streets of Paris!

12 December 2021 by Rey Armenteros

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.

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Before Reaching the Bloody Streets of Paris

05 December 2021 by Rey Armenteros

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!

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