La position du tireur couché - Jean-Patrick Manchette

The assassin who is going to do one more job and then retire from the business is a familiar crime thriller theme. I can think for two I've read recently, Max Allan Collins' Two For The Money (where Quarry has a similar problem in Blood Money with his financier and the stash he has put away for his retirement) and Pascal Garnier's Comment va la douleur? As one of the darkest of French crime writers Jean-Patrick Manchette evidently has his very own distinctive take on that theme in La position du tireur couché.

Having just finished his last hit in England, killer for hire Martin Terrier returns to Paris and packs up to leave for good. He has personal matters to take care of, and it's time to leave the murder business behind. His employer Monsieur Cox is unhappy with his decision and perhaps other people too, as Terrier is followed heading south out of Paris, which means he leaves something of a trail of death behind him. Some of the deaths are the result of his actions, others at the hands of those intending to threaten him. He arrives back in his hometown of Nauzac and looks up old friends and a former lover, only to find that inevitably things have changed since he was last there.

Manchette was very much a noir writer in the 'behaviourist' tradition, dealing unsentimentally with a violent and brutal world. Death in his books is dealt out with cold unflinching indifference. And not just killing, but rape and torture often feature to a quite shocking descriptive level in some of his books (Morge Pleine is pretty rough, I seem to recall), and La position du tireur couché, his last completed thriller published in 1981, is no exception, featuring a booby-trapped torture scene and some pretty gruesome killings. There is also a notable moral ambiguity or perhaps vacuity in his writing here, where it's not just the bad guys who do bad things. There are no good guys in fact, each person just has different motivations and ambitions.

As a behaviourist work you certainly aren't let into his thought processes, but it's clear that Terrier's background defines who he is to some extent. All his actions are in service to his unswerving adherence to the plan that he has mapped out for the rest of his life. Coming from a humble background, leaving a small provincial village at 18, he is determined to use the next 10 years to make something of his life and be worthy of marrying Anne, the daughter of the wealthy Freux family. That means making his money by whatever means necessary, even as a killer for hire. But only for 10 years. Inevitably things don't go to plan.

Manchette takes the behaviourist idea further here with Terrier taking on a condition of mutism later in the book, which makes his motivations and thought processes even more difficult to guage. "Je voudrais bien savoir ce que tu as dans la tête", Maubert, his minder on the final hit is mystified by Terrier, who is even more unfathomable than usual for someone in his line of work. Even as a novel in the typically bleak Série Noire outlook, Manchette pushes boundaries and actions further than anyone else, where even a bullet in the head doesn't keep Terrier down, but it certainly puts an end to his ambitions.

Reading notes: Jean-Patrick Manchette died in 1995, and only wrote about 10 crime thrillers, La position du tireur couché (1981) (published as 'The Prone Gunman' in English) was his final work in the genre. I have the Gallimard Quarto edition of his Romans noirs, which contains more of less all his crime fiction and includes La position du tireur couché, but I picked up a second-hand Folio policier 2017 reprint paperback edition of this book for convenience. I read about half of Manchette's Romans noirs when the collected Quarto edition was published in 2005 and have been intending for a long while to go back and read or re-read all his writing again, as he remains a major voice in French crime writing.