Command Performance
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- ¥2,000
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
A thrilling, inventive, playful, and unorthodox detective and caper novel, the latest work by a French master.
“Fans of Jean-Patrick Manchette's deadpan irony will appreciate Command Performance, Echenoz's vibrant, playful homage to the hard-boiled genre, which plays like The Big Lebowski on the Seine.” —Publishers Weekly
Gerard Fulmard is a loser. A disgraced former flight attendant, he attempts the métier of private detective, with spectacularly disastrous results, then begins working for an obscure political groupuscule beset by an outsized share of infighting and backroom maneuvering. At first employed as an enforcer, Fulmard is then co-opted by one of the party’s less savory factions, sinking in deeper and deeper until he finds himself the reluctant assassin of the party’s own leader—and that’s when things really start going downhill. Meanwhile, projectiles crash down from the sky, corpses turn up in perfect health, main characters suffer sudden death, and nothing is as it seems.
In Command Performance, Jean Echenoz, one of France’s most respected contemporary writers, toys with the tropes of genre fiction and high literature, displaying the twists of plot and turns of phrase that have become his signature, and that have made him, in the words of The Washington Post, “the most distinctive voice of his generation and the master magician of the contemporary French novel.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Echenoz's idiosyncratic latest (after Special Envoy), ne'er-do-well Gerald Fulmard runs a detective agency out of his Paris home after losing his job as an airline steward. When members of the Independent Popular Federation, a fringe political party, hire him to investigate Louise Tourneur, the daughter-in-law of the party's founder and honorary president, Franck Terrail, the case ensnares Gerald in nasty political squabbling and thorny family dynamics. The Louise job coincides with the politically motivated kidnapping of Nicole Tourneuer, Franck's wife and the party's national secretary. Gerald's investigative ineptitude causes him to incriminate himself in the kidnapping, and he becomes a blackmail target after he stumbles on a murder victim while trying to clear his name. When Nicole reemerges unharmed, Gerald's relief is short-lived, because party members immediately try to rope him into a far-fetched assassination plot against Franck himself. Fans of Jean-Patrick Manchette's deadpan irony will appreciate Echenoz's vibrant, playful homage to the hard-boiled genre, which plays a bit like The Big Lebowski on the Seine. This is a good bet for crime fiction fans seeking something off the beaten path.
