I might as well tell you right away, this is nothing new, but talking a little about Jean Amila again is never a bad thing. The Butcher of Howls is his nineteenth detective novel, it appeared in 1982 in the Série noire, it is a formidable libertarian story. At the end of the First World War, four children aged eight to thirteen, whose fathers were “shot as an example” in 1917, decided to execute General Des Gringues, nicknamed the Butcher of the Hurlus because, in more than having made them orphans, he sent thousands of men to their death in useless assaults on the territory of this commune of the Marne. So they run away from the orphanage and go looking for a weapon. “Spilling oil on the doormats of rotten bourgeois people, setting the flames there and waiting for the show, it was very promising.” At times, images from the film Zero driving by Jean Vigo stand out; The children’s revolt is a subject that is both moving and of great protest force. Jean Amila is one of the many pseudonyms of Jean Meckert (1910-1995), an author who is worth the detour: “I am a worker gone bad… I started telling populist stories at first, then, in this language that was mine, I told black stories.”
