By Marshall Grant
On March 17, 1983, Julien Mercier scribbled in his notebook: “They think The Hollow Kind is too cold, too mean. Good. I’ve done something right.” The manuscript, which had already bounced off two publishers, found a reluctant home at the smaller, now-defunct French house Éditions du Levain. Mercier had initially titled it Le Rien Sensible—”The Sensitive Nothing”—but eventually settled on The Hollow Kind, a more palatable label for what was, even then, a corrosive and strange entry in the crime canon. He continued: “If it’s not published, fine. I’ll mimeograph it myself. But it’s not just a story. It’s an x-ray of the spine of modern France.”
Mercier, who died in 1994 at age 51 from a brain aneurysm, is only now being recognized for the writer he was: a master of lean, cerebral noir, a stylist obsessed with precision and the moral failings of polite society. With the recent reissue of The Hollow Kind by Black Mercury Editions, English-speaking readers finally get a crack at this French gem—an elliptical, ice-pick of a novel that punches well above its modest page count.
By the time The Hollow Kind appeared in 1983, Mercier had already established himself as a literary contrarian. He didn’t trust the establishment, didn’t mingle with the writers of his generation, and barely tolerated the critics who dared review his books. To call him a recluse would be inaccurate—he was spotted often in jazz clubs and anarchist cafés in Marseille—but he preferred shadows.
Much like his American idol, Jim Thompson, Mercier viewed crime not as plot but as condition. His books are filled with sharp angles and broken people, with little in the way of redemption. Yet The Hollow Kind stands apart. Not for its brutality—though there’s plenty of that—but for the unsettling poise with which it delivers its themes: wealth without conscience, death without grief, and the unsettling hollowness at the heart of provincial privilege.
The novel follows Claire Rouanet, a contract killer who slips into a tiny port town under the alias Léonie Fournier. Her target is a land developer with shady political ties. But as in all Mercier tales, the central crime is just a frame. What really matters is the atmosphere—the fossilized social games of the nouveau riche, the endless, suffocating quiet of rooms with too much furniture, the dull throb of old money turning inward and rotten.
Mercier’s sentences are short, often declarative, like tiny blunt knives. Donald Fairclough’s translation is pitch-perfect, retaining both Mercier’s bite and his curious formal elegance. Where another writer might explain Claire’s motives or history, Mercier doesn’t. We meet her just after a killing, and we follow her as she sets up in a rented flat above a charcuterie shop, befriends a local pharmacist’s wife, and begins embedding herself in the social scaffolding of the town. We only learn much later—almost too late—that she is not just there to kill someone. She’s there to expose the whole damn town.
The Hollow Kind owes as much to Jean-Pierre Melville’s cinema as it does to Manchette or Simenon. It moves in straight lines, then suddenly drops the floor out from under you. One character—a retired naval officer with secrets—says early on, “The problem with living near the sea is that the bodies come back.” That line functions almost as a thesis. For Mercier, nothing stays buried, not secrets, not shame, and certainly not guilt.
This edition also includes an afterword by literary scholar Marianne Delatour, who situates The Hollow Kind within the context of the post-May 1968 disillusionment that shaped Mercier’s generation. While other writers drifted into autofiction and bourgeois ennui, Mercier stayed with pulp and made it political. His villains are not master criminals or clever psychopaths—they are bureaucrats, businessmen, family men.
What sets The Hollow Kind apart, though, is Claire. In a genre long dominated by tortured men and the women who suffer them, Claire is an avenger with no monologue, no mercy, and no interest in our sympathy. Her actions are quick, brutal, and disturbingly logical. She kills for money, yes—but she also kills to rebalance scales that the justice system won’t touch.
At one point, she reads an article about her victim and says, flatly, “He will die a respected man unless I stop him.” No emotion. No poetry. Just a task to complete. When she finally acts, Mercier delivers it in two sentences: “She waited. Then she didn’t.”
You don’t read Mercier for warmth. You read him for truth—and often, that truth comes wrapped in poison.Author Bio
Marshall Grant is a literary critic and failed jazz guitarist based in Chicago. His writing has appeared in The Refract,* Dead Pages,and occasionally in the margins of his old gig posters. He enjoys reissues, moody translations, and any novel under 150 pages that leaves bruises.
