This has a simple plot and the narrative and dialogue flow. There are two men and a woman and is of the type: Hal 'put a bullet into her temple'. Who is the cop, who is the villain? ( )

A French thriller published in 1956 and recently translated in 2016. It’s short (150 pages), its brutal and makes no concessions to political correctness. There is no time for character development, character settings, or scenic descriptions in Dard’s rough and tumble world where might is right. French noir, without the wisecracks.

Arrangements are made for an undercover cop to be placed in the same cell as a spy who has refused to talk. The reader does not know which one is the cop as the two men soon develop a love hate relationship that teeters on the edge of violence and frequently spills over. They plan an escape and shoot their way out of prison. We know that the cop has been told not to worry about “blood on the wall” and so there are no clues as to who is the good guy, which is probably the point: there are no good guys in this book. Most of the story is told through conversations between Frank and Hal, that is when they are not beating the crap out of each other. A woman appears on the scene which leads to even more fighting.

Frederic Dard wrote over 300 novels, but few of them have been translated into English. Perhaps Pushkin Vertigo who have published this are dipping their toe in the water. There has been a film and the piece started life as a play. A mornings entertainment if you like this sort of thing. It kept me reading until the end and I will try and catch the film. Three stars. ( )

This is a little gem of a book that was first published in France back in 1956. The author, Frederic Dard, published over 300 thrillers, suspense stories, plays and screenplays. This book was first written by Dard as a play and then released in a film directed by Robert Hossein in 1955. The book is a novelization of the film and has recently been translated to English with publication in the US.

The story involves two prisoners, Frank and Hal, sharing a cell. One of them is a spy and one of them is a police officer who has been told to help the spy escape prison, thereby earning his trust so he can learn more about the spy ring. The reader has no idea who is the spy and who is the police officer. It’s a short book and kept me guessing and I enjoyed it. Nothing in depth here with not much fleshing out of the characters but rather a simple straightforward suspenseful story that kept my interest.

This book was given to me by the publisher through Edelweiss in return for an honest review. ( )