Noir fiction is an ill-defined style of storytelling that for crime fiction readers has a clear but differing sense of meaning.
Noir is an English corruption of the French word noire, meaning dark, and is usually associated with American “hardboiled” crime fiction from the 1930s and ’40s by such greats as James M. Cain, Elmore Leonard, David Goodis and a host of other “pulp” detective story writers.
Noir fiction in Europe is quite another genre – shadowy more than dark. Because of the inherited literary faculty of European novelists and their grasp of the existential core of noir – unlit, not dark, brings it to focus. Gallic Books of London has translated into English one of the last books written by the iconic French literary writer Pascal Garnier before his death in 2010. How’s the Pain? is only the second book of Garnier’s extensive oeuvre to be translated into English.
How’s the Pain? gets its title from a greeting in African countries and plays no role in this gem of a book, besides its devious noir insinuation. There is no physical pain portrayed in the book, aside from the ordinary suffering everyone endures in some form and at some time or another. The lives of Everyman tend toward bleak, notwithstanding momentary achievements and accidental highlights – Life’s a bitch and then you die, and that’s noir down to the quick. And done no better than Georges Simenon and Pascal Garnier.
How’s the Pain? is a compact book about Simon Marechall, an aging vermin exterminator preparing to retire after one more job on the seacoast. He overnights in the provincial town where he chances to meet a young man by the name of Bernard, who is temporarily out of work as the result of losing two fingers in machinery he operates. Simon offers Bernard a handsome salary to drive him to his destination, a day away and a two-day round trip. Bernard needs permission from his mother – an ailing termagant holding on to delusions of grandeur by the neck of a bottle of rum – which Simon secures in one of the more memorably witty scenes of noir humor in the book.
Bernard is the polar opposite of Simon: innocent, naive, genuinely kind and wholly sane. He feels particularly proud and qualified to chauffeur Simon’s Mercedes, because he recently passed his driving test. On the way, Bernard sees next to a car parked on the side of the road a man beating a woman. True to Bernard’s parochial sense of principles, he stops to intercede. Simon is incensed by the delay. Bernard, who is overly obedient but nonetheless honor-bound, insists on saving a damsel in distress. Simon orders Bernard to stay behind the wheel, peevishly exits the car, and through the rearview mirror Bernard sees the antagonist suddenly disappear down the roadside embankment.
Now Bernard is chauffeuring an exasperated Simon and a young woman with an infant. And between Bernard’s sense of obligation to his employer and now this young mother and child, plus the growing sense of the real nature of Simon’s extermination commission, and the crying and odors coming from this infant passenger, Bernard’s holiday adventure turns into a most wonderfully wry noir murder mystery you’ll not soon forget.
It’s the sleeper of the year.
JeffMannix.com. Jeff Mannix is a local journalist and author.
