La Vie Est Dégueulasse

Léo Malet ★★★★★

Chain-smoking, rhum-soaked antiheroes engage in bloodshed and robberies in this typical Léo Malet novel.

It’s classic in style, but not in composition: the story is told by the murderer himself, a troubled and disillusioned twentysomething. Though he is somewhat less hard-boiled than detective Nestor Burma (main character of most of Malet’s work), the atmoshpere is still as dark as usual. With a touch of sarcastic Freudian analysis in the end, it’s as noir as it gets.

A bloody good read!