Command Performance

A thrilling, inventive, playful, and unorthodox detective and caper novel, the latest work by a French master.

“Fans of Jean-Patrick Manchette's deadpan irony will appreciate Command Performance, Echenoz's vibrant, playful homage to the hard-boiled genre, which plays like The Big Lebowski on the Seine.” —Publishers Weekly

Gerard Fulmard is a loser. A disgraced former flight attendant, he attempts the métier of private detective, with spectacularly disastrous results, then begins working for an obscure political groupuscule beset by an outsized share of infighting and backroom maneuvering. At first employed as an enforcer, Fulmard is then co-opted by one of the party’s less savory factions, sinking in deeper and deeper until he finds himself the reluctant assassin of the party’s own leader—and that’s when things really start going downhill. Meanwhile, projectiles crash down from the sky, corpses turn up in perfect health, main characters suffer sudden death, and nothing is as it seems.

In Command Performance, Jean Echenoz, one of France’s most respected contemporary writers, toys with the tropes of genre fiction and high literature, displaying the twists of plot and turns of phrase that have become his signature, and that have made him, in the words of The Washington Post, “the most distinctive voice of his generation and the master magician of the contemporary French novel.”

Jean Echenoz was born in 1947 in Vaucluse, France. He is the author of more than a a dozen novels, including Cherokee, Double Jeopardy, Chopin’s Move, Big Blondes, Piano, Ravel, Running, Lightning, and Special Envoy. His work has received a great number of literary prizes, among them the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Médicis, and the European Literature Jeopardy Prize. He lives in Paris.


Mark Polizzotti has translated over fifty books from the French, including Arthur Rimbaud's The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings (NYRB Poets), and is the author of twelve books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, and Why Surrealism Matters. He lives in New York.