Write to Kill [Hardcover]

Daniel Pennac (Author), Ian Monk (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1999

"What I'm offering you is love with a capital 'L,' all the love in the world!"

This is not the sort of offer professional scapegoat and downtrodden publisher Benjamin Malaussne is used to. But his boss, Queen Zabo, the redoubtable doyenne of the Parisian publishing world, has finally offered him a starring role-all he has to do is impersonate the world's best-loved but hitherto anonymous author. Yet things are never quite so simple for Malaussne and his extended family of misfits and chancers. Soon he is in deep: the theft of a manuscript, a frenzied readership, the disarray of his private life, and then a spate of connected murders that threaten to destroy Vendetta Press entirely.

Think of a cross between Diva and Delicatessen, set within the literary intrigue of a publishing house and the multiracial exuberance of low-life Paris, and you will be somewhere near the world of Pennac's Belleville quarter.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Benjamin Malauss?ne is not only the director of Vendetta Press, a small, literary Parisian publishing house, but also the official company scapegoat. And as this accomplished, satisfying third English-language installment of the French crime writer's Belleville series (The Fairy Gunmother, etc.) opens, Benjamin, tired of the ugly imperatives of the book business is tendering his resignation to Queen Zabo, matriarch of Paris publishing. But almost immediately, the queen makes him an offer he cannot refuse. Sales are dropping off for Vendetta's sole brand-name author, mysterious J.L. Babel, and Vendetta decides to launch a behemoth publicity campaign under the pretense of revealing the author's identity. By signing a lucrative deal to publicly impersonate J.L.B., Benjamin plans to secure the future of the numerous siblings he supports, though his formidable journalist girlfriend, Julie, disapproves. Benjamin is also the center of an extended, ethnically diverse, criminally suspect circle of cronies in the Belleville quarter of Paris who, together with his family and his epileptic canine, Julius the Dog, form his "tribe." The tribe is ambivalently preparing for Benjamin's sister Clara's wedding to Clarence Saint-Hiver, the governor of a model, experimental prison where the inmates form a collective of writers, sculptors and composers. But when Clarence is found gruesomely executedAapparently by his faithful chargesAon the morning of the wedding, the previously undetectable thread connecting J.L.B.'s towering success, Benjamin's charade and the prison slaying commences its sly, gradual unwinding. Pennac's mastery of his genre is complemented by his sly asides and carefully tempered irony, and his polished prose (deftly rendered in Monk's British-inflected translation) makes it plainer still that this is serious, sophisticated entertainment: crime fiction at its most admirable. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"The prose is stylish, the dialogue demotic." -- Ruth Morse, The Times Literary Supplement

"You'll laugh till you cry . . . a crime novel in a class of its own." -- Bertrand Audusse, Le Monde

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Harvill Press (August 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1860465358
• ISBN-13: 978-1860465352
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,110,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As good as the two first Malaussène stories, February 25, 1999

By 

Pistaccio (Bruxelles, Belgique) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Write to Kill (Hardcover)

If you're looking for a witty, breathtaking and original story, with deep things in it but which doesn't cry out loud "hey look I'm deep", with that little surreal touch that breaks into the reality, go for the Malaussène stories. This is the 3rd one. Start with the first "the scapegoat".(I read those in french, hope the translation is good).

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Does not quite "kill", March 16, 2001

By 

Endless Page (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Write to Kill (Hardcover)

This should have been an illustrated novel (bande desinee). (Pennac is an illustrator of Tardi BDs.) Vivid, memorable characterization, but marred by a kludgy, repetitive translation; misses wry and hits cute too often. The plot thrums along though suffers at the end from the same thing that marred "Smilla's Sense of Snow", a desperate sprint for the finish line. Writer blinded by science and hoping you'll believe the implausible ending. Still, fresh, barbed and imaginative.