Book: Tardi returns to Nestor Burma with “Du rififi à Ménilmontant”

Jacques Tardi is definitely retracing his steps. In 2022, he gave a tenth adventure of Adèle Blanc-Sec, fifteen years after the ninth volume of the series. I didn’t really like this rather useless codicil to an anthology series. The French cartoonist today presents a new investigation of Nestor Burma, taking up the character created by Léo Malet in 1943 and magnified between 1954 and 1959 in “The new mysteries of Paris”. Here too, it has been a decade and a half since the last adaptation by Malet, a writer with whom Tardi has deep affinities. This time our man is not content with transposing his novels into drawings. It covers the entirety of this large volume of 192 pages, with the exception of color. Jean-Luc Ruault added a few touches of red to the features, like the blood and Santa’s cloak, and vague pastel tones. A green and a blue almost indistinguishable from each other.

Why talk about Santa Claus, so often invoked in the book which also offers several dangerous specimens in its streets? Because the action takes place in the last days of 1957. Tardi’s work is linked to the past, as we know, but a past that is anything but simple. It is generally located in the first half of the 20th century, the 1950s still being before the great leap which would bring France into modernity. We are with “Du rififi à Ménilmontant” (whose title echoes the film “Du rififi chez les hommes” by Jules Dassin, released in 1955) in an almost car-free capital that concrete has not yet brutalized. The somewhat chaotic action takes place in the 20th arrondissement, where Jacques Tardi has lived for twenty-five years. A district not covered by Léo Malet in his “New Mysteries”, which nevertheless had to evoke all the districts. The thriller author, seized by a sort of dizziness, put down his pen after fifteen investigations by Nestor Burma, many of which were transposed between 1991 and 2003 on TV with the late Guy Marchand in the lead role. A very physically arranged Burma if we compare it to that of Tardi…

What happens in “From Rififi to Ménilmontant”? Many and very few things at the same time. It all starts like in “The Maltese Falcon” by John Huston after Dashiell Hammett. An elegant lady waits for Burma in her modest office to speak to him. But what follows will fundamentally diverge. We are not in Hollywood, but in somewhat gloomy bistros, where a Burma with a very cold goes to investigate the shady underbelly of a pharmaceutical company using not only animal but human experimentation. The anarchist Tardi thus defends one of his major causes, that of our so-called inferior brothers. There will be a lot of corpses throughout the pages, where the action literally and figuratively seems to go in circles. It will take a lot of wandering around the neighborhood for Nestor Burma to discover some semblance of the truth. He apparently knows a little more at the end than a reader finding here the opacity of American film noir.

The amateur will find here the synthetic trait of Tardi. His taste for a Paris before the Anne Hidalgo years, one of his pet peeves. His affiliation with anarchism is not necessarily on the left, having swallowed a little too much caviar for his taste. There is also a jumble in “Du rififi à Ménilmontant” the love of old bistros, the nostalgia of an old-fashioned radio, and the memory of telephone booths. The world was simpler and less hectic then. No more fair though. But probably less unstable. Tardi thus likes to reconstitute it in a sort of permanence. “From rififi to Ménilmontant”, this is time regained, even if we remain here very far from Proust. The designer also prefers to illustrate Céline, which he has already done three times.

Practical

“From rififi to Ménilmontant” by Tardi, published by Éditions Casterman, 192 pages.

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Born in 1948, Etienne Dumont studied in Geneva which were of little use to him. Latin, Greek, law. A failed lawyer, he turned to journalism. Most often in the cultural sections, he worked from March 1974 to May 2013 at the “Tribune de Genève”, starting by talking about cinema. Then came fine arts and books. Other than that, as you can see, nothing to report.More info

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