La Reine Noire - Pascal Martin

The initial set up of La Reine Noire is a little low key at first when two strangers turn up in Chanterelle, a small village in Lorraine region.  The village has seen better days, but since the decline of the Durand sugar refinery, its operations moved to Indonesia, it's been in terminal decline.  With the arrival of the two strangers however Chanterelle is suddenly a place of interest again with talk of the La Reine Noire (The Black Queen) factory stack that dominates the local landscape being put back into action by Spātz, the owner who originally closed the factory, now the mayor of Chanterelle.

The two recent arrivals however aren't exactly strangers, but they do have identities that they want to keep hidden. One is a man dressed completely in black, his eyes always covered by dark sunglasses.  He's now known as Mata, an assassin who works for a Chinese gangster in Indonesia, but in the village he is recognised as Toto Wotjeck, the son of a Polish immigrant worker, a drunk who died in an 'accident' at the factory many years ago. Toto has rented a place in town, back to sort out some business and he's causing a lot of interest in the sleepy town.

Michel Durand has also returned to the village in guise of psychiatrist, but he's really an undercover cop. He hasn't forgotten what happened to his father Antoine, the former manager who lost his job, lost his mind and killed himself after the closure of the refinery, but his grudge isn't entirely personal. He's acting on behalf of a police tip-off that Mata is in the region. Joe, owner of local hotel and popular location for secret affairs has plenty of gossip and history to recount to Durand while he is staying there.

What follows is very much within the série noire genre, where there's not so much a reversal of types according to good guys and bad guys as much as only differing degrees of nastiness between them. It's not just making it into being about a corrupt cop or a sympathetic assassin, but the whole town of Chanterelle are embedded in a web of vice and corruption, gossip and blackmail. It's tied of course to the image of the large tower of the refinery, the Black Queen, dominating the town, sharing in its slow decline into ruin.

The slow decline that takes something of a rapid turn with the arrival of Durand and Wotjeck, and a body count that would be improbable outside of a Jean-Patrick Manchette thriller (JPM explicitly referenced here as a book one of the characters is reading). Wotjeck is of course blamed for it all, looking weirdly gothic, dressed in black like the messenger of death, a number of suspicious deaths coinciding with his arrival in revenge to prevent the possibility of La Reine Noire reopening. To the villagers it's like a curse has descended on Chanterelle, but the truth is even darker than that.

As a série noire thriller, delving into the dark side of human nature, there's a transgressive edge in pushing a plot into unsavoury areas, but that doesn't mean it's entirely without realistic social commentary. It's not particularly deep, but then the attitudes it exposes in provincial France aren't well thought out either, based on prejudice and fear, of outsiders and foreigners, their responses motivated to some extent also by a sense of underlying guilt. It's an explosive cocktail.