Rough Trade (1995)

Dominique Manotti's debut crime novel, Rough Trade (1995, Trans. 2001) is astonishingly assured. A police procedural set in the Sentier district of Paris in 1980, the novel has an almost impossibly complicated plot that, remarkably, does not spoil the book at all, for two reasons: 1. the complexity feels absolutely natural as the police uncover an international plot revolving around drug and arms smuggling that starts with their investigation of the murder of a 12-year-old Thai child prostitute; 2. the pace of the novel never flags. The reader keeps track of the course of the investigation by the way the novel is organized according to calendar entries (stipulating the time, date, and place of each chapter) and this gives us the feeling of moving inexorably through time and space at such a rate that we are content not to have mastery over all the details (after all, the police don't have such mastery!) and instead we hang on and see where the ride will take us. Despite the fact that there is so much going on in the book (there is also a major sub-plot involving the attempts of illegal Turkish garment workers to achieve legal status) Rough never feels too crowded; rather, we feel that the complexity of real life is being honored and represented accurately. The other striking thing about the novel is its complete lack of sentimentality--the police officers are not heroes in the conventional sense (some of them being just as, if not more, flawed than the villains) but the best of them earn our respect for their commitment to the idea of retribution, if not justice. Not surprisingly, the results of their efforts are mixed--some are punished, some get away; some questions are answered, but many are not. But that incompleteness feels just as satisfying as every other part of this novel.