the last book I read

Rider On The Rain by Sébastien Japrisot.

I didn't expect to be doing another one of these quite so soon, but this is a very short book, and, in contrast to the last one, it's written in such a way as to be shorter even than the number of pages (151 in my Harvill Press edition) would suggest.

Just to digress for a minute, it would be a much more accurate and useful measure of a book's length to state the number of words in it as well as the number of pages. Since this one has a lot of dialogue in it (for reasons I'll come to in a minute) and since it's a smaller A-format paperback (my copy of The Double is in the larger B-format) its words-per-page ratio is considerably lower. Print size and spacing can vary considerably between books as well; for instance despite all being B-format paperbacks Independence Day and Riven Rock have quite small, tightly-spaced print while Arcadia and On Chesil Beach have larger, more widely-spaced print (almost absurdly so in On Chesil Beach's case - the publishers were obviously keen to bump up the page count as much as possible).

Anyway, I digress. Japrisot is quite a celebrated crime writer in France, though I'd never heard of him until I came across a couple of slim paperbacks in a bookshop in Hay-on-Wye the other day. Many of his books have been adapted into films, most famously A Very Long Engagement which was filmed in 2004. If my research is correct, however, this one is a retrospectively-novelised version of Japrisot's screenplay for the 1970 film noir starring Charles Bronson and Marlène Jobert (a few clips can be found here, here and here. Just as a tempter, the last one features Bronson gruffly speaking French and slapping some French bird around, and then having a fight).

I seem to have digressed again. The amusingly-named Mellie Mau lives on the French Riviera with her frequently-absent husband (a navigator for Air France). One day she sees a stranger get off the bus in a rainstorm. That evening the same stranger breaks into her house and rapes her; she later confronts him in the cellar, kills him with a shotgun and disposes of the body over a nearby cliff. Shortly after she meets American Harry Dobbs at a wedding - Dobbs seems to know a lot about her, her assailant and the events of that night, and a cat-and-mouse (chat-et-souris, if you will) game ensues. As you'd expect from a noir-ish crime thriller there's plenty of twisty-turniness and trickery before the end.

It's not just because it's quite short and dialogue-rich (since it's essentially a screenplay) that you can zip through it quickly, it's because it's genuinely compelling. It's a bit like an Elmore Leonard book transposed to a French Riviera setting with more smoking, Gallic shrugging and pretty women with Jean Seberg haircuts driving open-topped sportscars along winding clifftop roads at unsuitable speeds.