some idea of ​​noir

You can love or not cuff, but it remains indeed, more than fifteen years after his untimely death alas, one of the most singular voices and the most talented of our polar hexagon. To say it was a demanding stylist. Rarely has a writer says "gender" has been brought up as a concern of form. As he often claimed Hammett, one readily mentions his behaviorism, but his true literary model, the absolute reference, of course it was Flaubert. Like him, cuff chiseled his novels sentence by sentence, word by word, with maniacal precision, endlessly repeating his text to eradicate any shot, any slag, making his prose not simply the vehicle of a plot but an end aesthetic in itself.

Ah, how many times have I open one or another of his books at random to regale me time to a few pages of his inimitable writing! In fact, dare we say, Cuff was not only the best writer of thrillers of the seventies, he just gave the French literature of this period some of his masterpieces, and I think in particular of "The N'Gusto business "," Nada "or" Le Petit West Coast Blue "whose relevance and virtuosity always impress forty years later. What there is particularly original, I think, and even subversive work cuff is that it has introduced the formalism or experimentation in the popular novel, conferring at the same time it unprecedented intellectual legitimacy.

While writing thrillers, Cuff constantly questions the "form" thriller. This includes the compulsory figures better dynamite blows of derision and second degree. Is it homage, parody, postmodernism? It's a bit all this at a time ... In any case, one thing is certain: when the famous label "néopolar" will become a very distant and very hazy concept that only historians of the genre will keep the memory , all the novels in this collection, they will continue to garner new readers and delight by their humor and intelligence!