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So the mystery begins, but not on the streets of L.A., Chicago or New York. This is "The Bloody Streets of Paris," (ibooks; 192 pp.; $17.95), Jacques Tardi's comix adaptation of Leo Malet's 1942 French detective novel, "120, rue de la Gare." Instead of fedoras you get berets. Instead of bars you get cafes. But pretty much everything else that typifies the P.I. genre — sleazebags, oafish cops and beautiful girls — stays the same. With a fascinating French twist, the action takes place during the Nazi occupation. Where most detective fiction involves a city unofficially run by gangsters, here the villains are outwardly in control. As atmospheres go, it doesn't get much more corrupt and poisonous than this. On streets darkened by air-raid blackout conditions and plastered with anti-Semitic propaganda, Burma goes about his stoic business.
Burma's investigations take him from a POW camp to Lyons to Paris. Along the way he discovers Bob's recent interest in the long-closed case of a jewel thief who left a strange posthumous riddle. Meanwhile the girl at the station has vanished and the address Bob shouted doesn't exist. Things heat up when Burma gets ambushed on a bridge but the attacker winds up a corpse in the river. The cast quickly expands to include several cops, a reporter, another P.I., the P.I.'s secretary, her lover, Burma's secretary, a shifty doctor and a well-connected shyster. Tardi manages to stay on top of all this, barely, through his skill as a clear storyteller. It feels like surfing. The mystery stays together and compels you forward, though it threatens to collapse in a boiling sea of confusion.
A bullet-riddle corpse and a girl with a gun baffle a battered Nestor Burma in "The Bloody Streets of Paris" |
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If Robert Crumb were ever to adapt Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade books, it would have something of the resonance this Tardi/Malet team has for this work. Malet's Nestor Burma, detective de choc, or ace detective, appears in multiple hardboiled volumes and has been adapted to film and television. Tardi, like Crumb, became a major comix creator during the 1970s, though unlike Crumb, he didn't have to go underground to do it. Art Spiegelman's forward to the book describes Tardi as "one of the single most influential comix artists to come out of the French adult comics revolution of the 70's." In spite of this he has gotten scant attention in the U.S., with just a few of his many books getting translated. Though it originally appeared in the mid-80s, this first of five Tardi/Malet books is the only one to have yet appeared in English.
As imagined by Tardi, Nestor Burma has an ovular face with two dots for eyes and a permanent scowl. In profile, his face appears flat, like a blank wall, except for a bump of a nose and a pipe sticking out of a mouth that never opens, even when speaking. Tardi works in the classic French bandes dessinee style (a close match to the work of Japanese comix master Osamu Tezuka, incidentally) with near-photographic reproductions of backgrounds that the flat, "cartoonish" characters inhabit. The "Tintin" mysteries by Herge are the most famous example of this style, which Tardi updates with the more cynical eye of a newer generation. The themes are darker and so are the images.
With "The Bloody Streets of Paris," Jacques Tardi and Leo Malet do for comix what the French New Wave did for film: taking the trappings of American pulp fiction and retooling them with a cool, European update. Why the French take seriously what we throw away — detective pictures and comix among other things — remains anybody's guess. Just be glad that they do. Entertaining, adult pulp comix have become all too scarce.
"The Bloody Streets of Paris" can be found at smart comic shops and bookstores.
Don't miss the annual top ten list of comix for the past year, coming in two weeks.