Grade: A

At the heart of any crime noir is a mystery, usually involving murder in some capacity. What sets the genre apart, though, is that the mystery doesn’t matter. We don’t care whodunit, mostly because the story exists in a world so scarred that no traditional justice or resolution will ever set things right again. Noir is all our morbid sensibilities condensed into a single narrative. What matters is the settings and the language. These are the tools a noir writer uses to engage their audience. In Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Chaos, this is done masterfully. The book is the first in The Marseilles Trilogy, which is apparently something of a classic in France, is being reintroduced to American audiences, I presume because of the recent success of European crime fiction in the States. I hope that this series catches on out here, because the first book of this series is just about perfect.

The story, told in the first person, follows Fabio, a veteran cop who spent his early years as a common thug. His two old friends who never got out of the crime life, Ugo and Manu, have been killed, and though Fabio has lost all connection to them, he pursues justice for them out of some sense of long forgotten obligation. He hits the streets of Marseilles, floating around crooks, thieves, gangs, prostitutes, and the mob, slowly putting the pieces together. Along the way, a young innocent girl from Fabio’s past is raped and murdered, and he must add that to the growing list of wrongs he must right.

Izzo uses this series of mysteries, and the genre, as a commentary on race relations in France. Anybody not traditionally French, i.e. not white, are treated like second class citizens at best, particularly the Arabs. The cops aren’t interested in making the ghettos any safer, just in arresting and harassing the hoodlums that live within them. Only Fabio, despite his many faults as a man, lover, and cop, seems to have any relationship for them on a human level. Izzo creates a Marseilles so thick with hate and crime and seediness, yet bursting with life and music and sex, that it’s hard not to see it as a living, breathing entity. This novel isn’t interested in solving the problems, or even expressing an interest that the city’s problems can be solved, only that Marseilles, like a real life Gotham, still has enough good in it worth fighting for.

Izzo takes careful pains to show the reader the beauty still living inside the city. He’s obsessed with the food and gives long descriptions of how certain dishes are prepared and eaten. Fabio spend a great deal of time eating and drinking in this novel, populating the bars and corner restaurants, always trying different foods and gorging himself on various kinds of booze. He listens to blues mostly, and can recite classic French poetry, in fact he hates contemporary literature. In a world so consumed with its own filth, these aspects lend a necessary hip and sophisticated element.

A complaint about this book could be that Izzo too often goes on tangents where he forgets about the plot for pages at a time and instead just rants about life in the city or dishes out fish recipes or goes on long tirades about American blues. But rather than feeling like wordy distractions, these digressions are the lifeblood of this novel, much more than the mystery itself. Don’t read Total Chaos for a good mystery, read it as a celebration of the Noir genre, the emotionally crippled characters, and a city that is just as dangerous as it is beautiful.