Rough Trade – Sublime & Gritty

Rough Trade by Dominique Manotti is a fantastic euro crime thriller that hits the mark on all levels. There are no wasted words no paragraphs to pad out the story, like a surgeon with a scalpel she is incisive with her story telling and gets right down to business. Written in 1995 about the seedy underworld immigrant Paris of the early 1980s this has all the grit you would expect.

Superintendent Daquin is head of the Drugs Squad and is based in the 10th arrondissement for the duration of his investigations. This is the area of Le Sentier where there are many clothing workshops owned and worked in by Turks mostly illegal workers. They have their own action committee campaigning to get the legal work papers which also lead to various clashes.

Daquin and his squad have been called out to a murder where a young Thai prostitute has been found along with a quantity of drugs. The work room where the dead body has been found was a clothing workshop but all the workers and machines had been spirited away.

While investigating the murder of the Thai prostitute and the Turkish drugs connections Daquin discovers a world of intrigue police corruption and some of the targets protected at the highest levels. This does not put Daquin off the scent but makes him more determined to find the truth and at the same time root out the corruption.

There is a stark bleakness that pervades throughout Rough Trade, the mixture of illegal workers, where death is cheap and drugs a plenty. Where the Turks are fighting the battles of their homeland on French soil where the extreme right and left face each other off. Where police investigations can be interfered with by a protective establishment and still somehow manage to get the job done in spite of those higher up the food chain.

Through the excellent translation from the French this is writing at its best the prose gives off the imagery of a seedy underworld that is so vivid. You can smell the strong coffee and the raki mixed with the smell of Gauloises, you can hear the sewing machines and the clatter of small workrooms and the sounds on the streets.

This may be a short crime thriller but it hits the mark and is so enjoyable and through the skill of the writing you feel at the heart of the book and the investigation. This is a wonderful example of Euro-Crime at its best. ( )

The Paris police force as portrayed by Dominique Manotti in her debut novel Rough Trade is the most corrupt force I've encountered in a lifetime of detective novels including James Ellroy's hard-hitting early Los Angelos novels. Need to questions a prostitute--be sure to make free use of her skills first. Someone refusing to give you the information you want-- beat them until they do. If you're a Paris police detective, your authority is your ticket to get whatever you want from anyone who comes into contact with the law, especially anyone in the country illegally.

Even Inspector Daquin, our nominative hero, is beneath contempt as far as I'm concerned. His beautiful young lover, a Turkish man in the country illegally, is only willing to be with him because Daquin has evidence that could get him deported. As long as Inspector Daquin keeps the evidence to himself, Soleiman remains his "willing" lover.

While the detectives are not nice people, the criminals in Rough Trade are worse yet. Ms. Manotti's novel deals with some of the major political hot-button issues of the 1980's: exploitation of illegal immigrant labor, international prostitution rings, the growing international heroin trade, and the very powerful men who make them all possible as the profit from them.

Rough Trade's plot concerns the murder of a child prostitute who died shortly after an encounter in a sophisticated and secretive establishment where powerful business men can go to have themselves filmed while having sex. (Home video was a relatively novel technology in the early 1980's.) The investigation takes Inspector Daquin through the underworld of Paris's sex trade, drug abuse and human trafficking. We don't meet anyone we can really like with the exception of Inspector Daquin's unwilling lover Solieman who is working to bring legal recognition to the Turkish men who, while in the country illegally, make the manufacture of clothing possible through the cheap labor they provide the Paris rag trade.

Rough Trade is a challenging novel. The plot takes the reader all over the place and the characters, while true to their world, are not likeable. They are all degrees of bad. But Inspector Daquin does find a level of redemption in the end, I think, through his dedication to find the killer of this one girl. His motives have much more to do with career than with altruism, and he never does make the connection between what happend to her and what he is doing to Solieman, but even dedication to a career is dedication to something, and a bit of good comes out it all in the end. That's something, I guess.

I've got two more Dominique Manotti novels in my TBR pile. Will I read more? Probably. But I'm going to wait a while. I'm not the only reviewer to compare her to James Ellroy's early work. The comparison is apt. Both are terrific writers, both bring the underworlds they portray to vivid life, and both can leave a disquieting aftertaste. ( )

translated from the French by Margaret Crosland and Elreda Powell)
An extremely dark police procedural centered in the Turkish community and the garment district of Paris in 1980, when the American hostages were still held in Iran. Within this international political climate, interlocking problems of immigration, drug importation, and sexual exploitation consume a Paris crime scene team when a Thai child prostitute is found dead in a garmet factory. The police are not immune to financial and sexual corruption, complicating the investigation led by commissionaire Daquin, who is himself secretly involved with a Turkish immigrant labor leader.

The book is written in strict chronological order, with each entry marked with date and time, although sometimes the changes in venue are not immediately clear.

This book was economic history professor Manotti's first crime novel and won the top prize for best thriller of the year from the French Crime Writers Association, according to the book jacket.

I found this book disturbing, confusing, and of ambiguous morality. An interesting read. ( )

Very very clever noir thriller. Intricately plotted using a timeline from March 3, 1980 to May 30, 1980. In Paris an investigation begins in the aftermath of the murder of a 13 year old Thai prostitute. Heading the team assigned to the investigation is Inspector Daquin. Inspector Daquin is a homosexual and the lover of Soleiman a Turkish labor activist--a man who has fled Turkey fearing for his life and on the run from the right wing killers of the Grey Wolves--who keeps him informed of happenings in the Sentier district home of a number of illegal textile manufacturers many of which depend on illegal workers and who are allowed to thrive by paying off crooked police officials and politicians. There is an Iranian connection also in these days leading up to the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis that follows. Heroin and fashion models--a lot of fixes are in and it's up to Daquin and his team--who unbeknownst to him have been infiltrated by a pair of corrupt cops--to unravel all the threads and bring it all to a conclusion. Before he will crack the case several more will die until a not quite successful conclusion to the case. And along these same streets that the good detective treads the sinister shadow of maybe the most famous Grey Wolf of all---Ali Agca (the would be assassin of Pope John Paul II) stalks--always seemingly just one step ahead of justice. Very well written--a nice quick pace and superbly plotted. An excellent book. ( )