Bad Cop, Bad Cop: Jean-Claude Izzo and Mediterranean Noir, by Tom Andes
That was the history of Marseilles, and always had been. A utopia. The only utopia in the world. A place where anyone, of any color, could get off a boat or a train with his suitcase in his hand and not a cent in his pocket, and melt into the crowd. A city where, as soon as he’d set foot on its soil, this man could say, “This is it. I’m home.”
-Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos
Crime fiction does setting uniquely well. From Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles to Robert B. Parker’s Boston to Charles Willeford’s Miami, crime novels map out the cities we live in and give us the cities we imagine. How much, for instance, does the popular perception of Los Angeles owe to Chandler’s novels and their numerous adaptions?
When I was lucky enough to go to Marseilles a couple years ago, I used Jean-Claude Izzo’s magnificent trilogy of novels set there as a guide. We stayed in Les Goudes, the fishing village at the edge of the city where Izzo’s detective, Fabio Montale, lives. Nestled between the metropolitan area and the beautiful, forbidding landscape of the calanques, it’s accessible by one road. We spent several nights in the Panier, the working-class Italian neighborhood north of the port where Izzo was born.
Of course, the city has changed. Izzo’s novels were published in French in the 1990s and translated into English in the 2000s. The Panier is gentrifying, hip restaurants and art galleries nestled among the public squares and apartment buildings. One of the squares is named for Izzo.
No doubt Les Goudes has changed in the last 30 years, too. Still, it feels like a village at the end of the world, desolate, remote, with the ruins of a Napoleonic-era fort and the graffitied concrete shells of Nazi bunkers in the hills above the ramshackle fishing cottages and the shimmering blue port. Kids from the city drive out for the day, car stereos blasting French hip hop. Most of the crowd seemed to be local or from elsewhere in Europe.
A few years ago, at the height of the popular protests against police violence against Black Americans, police procedurals as a genre came in for criticism. I love crime fiction, and I love the police procedural subgenre, but I’m not insensitive to the argument that by their very nature, they glorify police work. No doubt a certain amount of crime fiction is “copaganda,” upholding stereotypes about cops and criminals and justifying the often-brutal things cops do.
Yet from Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s brilliant Martin Beck series to Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Situationist noirs, from Chester Himes’ Harlem novels to Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins mysteries, from Attica Locke’s Texas Ranger novels to Megan Abbott’s ongoing feminist reinvention of the domestic thriller, there also exists a tradition of crime writing invested in disrupting those cliches. Some—though not all of it—is explicitly leftwing. Izzo’s Marseille trilogy belongs to this tradition.
Fabio Montale isn’t a bad cop because he beats his suspects during interrogations, or because he’s crooked or dirty. He’s a bad cop because he’s more of a social worker than a policeman. Like the author, he’s the child of working-class Italian immigrants. Montale grew up dabbling in petty crime. He understands the socioeconomic conditions that cause people to become criminals, and he’s more interested in ameliorating those conditions than he is in cracking heads. That makes him a laughingstock among his peers—and his superiors don’t like it, either.
Like many of the best crime novels, Izzo’s trilogy collapses the distinction between cop and criminal. In the first book, Total Chaos, Montale investigates the murders of two of his childhood friends. Because they never went straight, the system doesn’t have much interest in their demise. But they’re Montale’s friends, so he does.
The plots of the novels are labyrinthine and difficult to summarize. Izzo seems more interested in capturing a tone, a mood, in evoking the many layers of Marseilles. Descriptions of food abound. Izzo also wrote a book about food, Garlic, Mint, and Sweet Basil: Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction. He has a predilection not for the fancier, haut-cuisine we associate with the South of France, but for the simple fish and vegetable stews, the humbler pasta dishes that are staples of a working-class Mediterranean diet.
Much of the novels takes place in the bars, cafes, and restaurants that are Montale’s hangouts. At its best, crime fiction affords a view of every strata of society from the bottom to the top; that’s one reason it captures place so well. Izzo takes us from the housing projects to the halls of justice, from the tiny fishing village where Montale lives to the massive redevelopment projects underway in the city center near the old port.
Marseille is second-largest city in France. It’s located in Provence, the region of the country perhaps most familiar to Americans outside Paris and Bordeaux. Famous for its cuisine, the region was once a socialist stronghold, but the last few decades have seen it turn to the far right. The rise of the National Front as a political force hangs over the novels.
Montale’s investigations reveal every strata of French society to be corrupt. In the beginning, the crimes he is trying to solve are linked to local organized crime. Montale’s investigations reveal connections to corrupt cops, religious extremists, and fascists. By the end of the trilogy, this has spiderwebbed out, implicating global financial institutions and European governments. The backdrop for all this is the collapse of the USSR, the rise of the European Union, and the acceleration of neoliberal globalization. Along with globalization comes globalized organized crime.
Strictly speaking, only the first novel is a police procedural. Ironically, when Montale becomes invested in police work again, it puts him at odds with his superiors, who are more interested in self-advancement than they are in justice. Disillusioned, Montale quits being a cop. The second book, Chourmo, might be classified as a traditional detective novel: an old flame asks Montale to find her missing son. And in the trilogy’s final novel, Solea, Montale sets out to protect an old friend, a journalist, from the Mafia.
Yet over the course of the three books, the world becomes darker, bleaker. The novels are therefore best classified as noir. But while the downbeat ending in most American noir is a matter of individual pathology, a man wanting too much or being too ambitious, his reach exceeding his grasp, the downbeat ending in Izzo’s trilogy of noir novels comes from their interest in cataloging the social failures that create the conditions for crime. The real criminals are untouchable, usually in positions of legitimacy and power. The world in Izzo’s books is irredeemably corrupt. Even the scant opportunities for solidarity his characters are afforded matter very little in the face of money and power. (Even if Chandler’s Los Angeles is presented as a seat of moral decay, that is never explicitly connected to global politics the way the moral rot is in Izzo’s trilogy.)
I’ve seen people call Izzo the originator of Mediterranean noir. I don’t read French, and not enough of the subgenre has been translated for me to say what the defining characteristics are, though Sandro Ferri does a great job in this essay translated from the Italian by Michael Reynolds and published in Crime Reads in 2018. Ferri likewise asserts that interest in politics and in material explanations for crime distinguishes the Mediterranean noir subgenre.
Montale is a Euroskeptic. He doesn’t trust that the pols in Brussels have the best interests of his city at heart. Whether Izzo shared those attitudes I don’t know. A pacifist, an antiwar activist, he stood for office as a Socialist and was an editor for the leftwing paper La Marseillaise. Throughout the novels the good characters, the people Montale likes most and who Izzo most lovingly depicts, read La Marseillaise as opposed to the other papers, which Montale characterizes as having made accommodations to the National Front.
Not that plot is unimportant to Izzo. A journalist by trade, he researched the rise of global organized crime and its ties to legitimate financial and governmental institutions. In the final novel, the journalist friend Montale is trying to save is in hot water because she is investigating the Mafia’s ties to those institutions. The books explicitly argue that neoliberal trade policies, deregulation, and the dismantling of the welfare state will lead to social inequality and radicalized violence, fueling a resurgent far right. Considering Europe’s and France’s present reality and the failures of Macron-style centrism—considering the reality of the United States in 2025—Izzo’s novels are prescient.
Yet from the languorous descriptions of the landscape in Mediterranean France to the fact Montale sometimes gives us recipes, these books are about simple pleasures. A jazz buff, a fan of American bluesmen Pinetop Perkins and Lightnin’ Hopkins, Montale is also an incurable romantic. Perhaps because his creator was a poet, he spouts lines of poetry. He also cries a lot for a man in a leading role in a genre associated with tough, white masculinity.
Even as Montale loses everything, and his people are swept aside by history, the novels affirm the values of friendship, solidarity, and connection. Izzo’s novels take the vantage point all great noir ought to take, looking at the world from the bottom up.
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