Write to Kill - Hardcover

Pennac, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1860465358 ISBN 13: 9781860465352

Publisher: Harvill Pr, 1999

Synopsis

"What I'm offering you is love with a capital 'L,' all the love in the world!"

This is not the sort of offer professional scapegoat and downtrodden publisher Benjamin Malaussne is used to. But his boss, Queen Zabo, the redoubtable doyenne of the Parisian publishing world, has finally offered him a starring role-all he has to do is impersonate the world's best-loved but hitherto anonymous author. Yet things are never quite so simple for Malaussne and his extended family of misfits and chancers. Soon he is in deep: the theft of a manuscript, a frenzied readership, the disarray of his private life, and then a spate of connected murders that threaten to destroy Vendetta Press entirely.

Think of a cross between Diva and Delicatessen, set within the literary intrigue of a publishing house and the multiracial exuberance of low-life Paris, and you will be somewhere near the world of Pennac's Belleville quarter.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Pennac has written four humorous crime novels set in the Belleville quarter of Paris, of which this is the third. The Fairy Gunmother and The Scapegoat are also available from Harvill. He lives in Paris.

Reviews

Benjamin Malauss?ne is not only the director of Vendetta Press, a small, literary Parisian publishing house, but also the official company scapegoat. And as this accomplished, satisfying third English-language installment of the French crime writer's Belleville series (The Fairy Gunmother, etc.) opens, Benjamin, tired of the ugly imperatives of the book business is tendering his resignation to Queen Zabo, matriarch of Paris publishing. But almost immediately, the queen makes him an offer he cannot refuse. Sales are dropping off for Vendetta's sole brand-name author, mysterious J.L. Babel, and Vendetta decides to launch a behemoth publicity campaign under the pretense of revealing the author's identity. By signing a lucrative deal to publicly impersonate J.L.B., Benjamin plans to secure the future of the numerous siblings he supports, though his formidable journalist girlfriend, Julie, disapproves. Benjamin is also the center of an extended, ethnically diverse, criminally suspect circle of cronies in the Belleville quarter of Paris who, together with his family and his epileptic canine, Julius the Dog, form his "tribe." The tribe is ambivalently preparing for Benjamin's sister Clara's wedding to Clarence Saint-Hiver, the governor of a model, experimental prison where the inmates form a collective of writers, sculptors and composers. But when Clarence is found gruesomely executedAapparently by his faithful chargesAon the morning of the wedding, the previously undetectable thread connecting J.L.B.'s towering success, Benjamin's charade and the prison slaying commences its sly, gradual unwinding. Pennac's mastery of his genre is complemented by his sly asides and carefully tempered irony, and his polished prose (deftly rendered in Monk's British-inflected translation) makes it plainer still that this is serious, sophisticated entertainment: crime fiction at its most admirable. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvill Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1860465358
• ISBN 13: 9781860465352
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 277