Jean-Patrick Manchette pushes the situationist strategy of dérive and détournement to the point of comic absurdity, throwing a wrench into the workings of his main characters’ lives and gleefully recording the anarchy that results

Jean-Patrick Manchette, The Mad and the Bad. Trans by. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York Review Books Classics, 2014. [1972.]

Michel Hartog, a sometime architect, is a powerful businessman and famous philanthropist whose immense fortune has just grown that much greater following the death of his brother in an accident. Peter is his orphaned nephew—a spoiled brat. Julie is in an insane asylum. Thompson is a hired gunman with a serious ulcer. Michel hires Julie to look after Peter. And he hires Thompson to kill them. Julie and Peter escape. Thompson pursues. Bullets fly. Bodies accumulate.
The craziness is just getting started.
Like Jean-Patrick Manchette’s celebrated Fatale, The Mad and the Bad is a clear-eyed, cold-blooded, pitch-perfect work of creative destruction.


Jean-Patrick Manchette: raconteur, bon vivant, leftist militant, agent provocateur, swinger, French crime kingpin, gadfly foe of the Fifth Republic. Man-oh-man Manchette was a decades-long hurricane through the Parisian cultural scene. We must revere him now and rediscover him this very instant. Jean-Patrick Manchette was Le Homme.—James Ellroy
This early masterpiece by Jean-Patrick Manchette shows him in
most glorious, coldest fury, wrapping a scathing critique of the excesses of greed and capitalism in the bloody bow of a chase thriller. You’ll want to turn the pages of The Mad and the Bad at the fastest possible clip, but slow down a little and you’ll see how much Manchette packs in—and how much of a punch this mean little book packs.—Sarah Weinman, Editor of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives

In France, which long ago embraced American crime fiction, thrillers are referred to as polars. And in France the godfather and wizard of polars is Jean-Patrick Manchette…. He’s a massive figure…. There is gristle here, there is bone.—The Boston Globe

“The crime novel,” [Manchette] claimed, “is the great moral literature of our time”—shortly before he set about proving it.—James Sallis

Manchette is legend among all of the crime writers I know, and with good reason: his novels never fail to stun and thrill from page one.—Duane Swierczynski

Manchette called crime novels ‘the great moral literature of our time.’ Manchette pushes the situationist strategy of dérive and détournement to the point of comic absurdity, throwing a wrench into the workings of his main characters’ lives and gleefully recording the anarchy that results.—Jennifer Howard

First published in 1972, this taut crime thriller from French neo-noir master Manchette (Fatale) is suffused with the dissipated left-wing malaise of post-’68 France. Wealthy Parisian architect Michel Hartog springs Julie Ballanger from a New Age mental hospital and hires her to look after his nephew, Peter, a boy of six or seven whose parents died in a plane crash. Meanwhile, Thompson, a vicious hit man with a queasy stomach, eats choucroute after a particularly grisly job. A mysterious client recruits Thompson to kidnap Julie and Peter and kill them, making their deaths look like the work of the mentally unstable nanny. But Julie and Peter escape, and are pursued across France by Thompson and his thugs. Will Julie discover who hired Thompson in time to turn the tables, or will nanny flambeau be on the dessert menu? Manchette (1942–1995) unobtrusively weaves his social criticism into the well-paced plot. - Publishers Weekly

In crime fiction, the egg came before the chicken. About a hundred years ago, American slang started comparing a person’s character to the specific preparation of an egg. A few decades earlier, in the late-nineteenth century, you could say someone was a “bad egg” or a “rotten egg,” but the metaphor was weak, lacking precision and a certain degree of imagination. Even today, a concerned parent can get away with calling a gang of underage drinkers “bad eggs,” but this usage hasn’t attracted nearly the same attention or cultural significance as the idiom that was popularized shortly afterward, and immediately made synonymous with a certain breed of crime stories: “hard-boiled.” Suddenly some Americans—and usually men—were hard-boiled. Hammett was hard-boiled, so was Chandler, and so were the tough, no-nonsense characters they created. Hard-boiled culture became defined by the familiar imagery—cigarettes, whiskey, briefcases stuffed with cash, fistfights, forceful kisses, and gunshots—and the venomous morality of their novels, and of others like them. This setting was populated with loners, thugs, forlorn lovers, estranged detectives, and crooked cops, and here, crime disrupted order, money ruled over everything, and violence became absolutely necessary. People spoke frankly yet deceived and succumbed to trickery; they killed without so much as a second thought or died insignificantly. Hard-boiled crime then became a process and a style, too, sharing many of the same obvious qualities as hard-boiled eggs: opacity and coagulation. The genre didn’t rely on a character’s deep interiority or in rich descriptions and backstories; everything could be clearly seen and understood as a solid silhouette of mass.

Naturally, the hard-boiled genre couldn’t be confined to a single country or language. Like Jerry Lewis—and more or less at the same time—the hard-boiled novel was successfully exported to France, where it was called the roman noir: Bogart translated nicely into Belmondo, shit easily into merde. One of the great innovators of this new aesthetic was the French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, who started publishing novels in the early seventies. However, instead of following closely in the footsteps of his heroes Hammett and Chandler, the American paradigms, Manchette tried to push the limits of the hard-boiled novel as far as it would go: P.G. Wodehouse fondly described a few of his own characters as “twenty-minute eggs,” but Manchette’s seem to be boiled overnight, or in other cases—to make this metaphor more excessive—deviled eggs. Sometimes playing with the tropes of the roman noir and sometimes injecting it with his own political messages, Manchette expressed his desire to write “detective novels that are self-destructive, that are excessive, in other words that try to be to the classic detective novel, to the American detective novel what, all things considered, Don Quixote was to tales of chivalry.” But far from being a postmodern gag, Manchette parodied in order to enrich, and subverted to keep his readers guessing (and readers of detective fiction are a uniquely suspicious and suspect bunch, who, according to Borges, were invented by Poe for the purpose of being able to read him; Auden suggested these readers pursued murderous fantasies that they wanted to gratify but were too afraid to translate into action; while Manchette expressed pity for anyone who would read crime as a pleasant distraction). Building upon the hard-boiled genre and creating an offshoot of his own called the néo-polar, Manchette was a sincere but complicated trickster, a writer who claimed that detective fiction was “the great moral literature of our time,” who wanted to use the genre to expose the pitfalls of capitalism and the victims of the exploited classes, who found inspiration in Guy Debord’s theories but thought Hammett was the best novelist in the world since 1920, who looked more like a TV game show host than a provocateur, and who produced thin novels that are very entertaining and stylistically singular.

The Mad and the Bad is the latest Manchette novel to appear in English, which has been skillfully translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Originally published in 1972, the novel shares the same nightmarish and unclassifiable qualities of what Kingsley Amis said of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: “not quite a political bad dream, nor a metaphysical thriller, nor a cosmic joke in the form of a spy novel, but it has something of all three.” Yet unlike Chesterton’s novel, The Mad and the Bad is an entirely profane nightmare, which only flirts with moral or ideological messages, throwing them out in offhand ways, so as not to distract too much from the thrill of the ride. And what a ride! The novel begins with a strange, unassuming premise: Julie is somewhat randomly plucked from an asylum by the immensely wealthy philanthropist and businessman Michel Hartog, to care for his bratty, orphaned nephew Peter. It doesn’t matter that Julie is psychologically unbalanced or that she’s unqualified as a nursemaid, Hartog seems as well-meaning as he is eccentric and filthy rich: according to his chauffeur who has a debilitating limp from the war, “The boss’s way of doing good is over the top. He only hires retards . . . The cook is epileptic. The gardener only has one arm, pretty handy for using the shears. His private secretary is blind. His valet suffers from locomotor ataxia—no wonder his meals arrive cold!” Julie is an odd fixture at this modern mansion lined with Mondrians and Pollocks—but her time here is short-lived: the day after beginning her new job as a nursemaid, both Julie and Peter are kidnapped and flung into an elaborate plot, which begins to spiral out of control as the unlikely pair are pursued across France by a sickly hired assassin named Thompson and a couple of his cronies. Thompson, the veteran killer, perfectly contrasts Julie’s inexperience with the criminal world: he’s an exemplary hard-boiled character, who embodies many of the genre’s ideals—an unsentimental thug who spouts wooden lines like, “Don’t move or I’ll hurt you” and “They’ll have to be killed, all three of them”—but he’s tired and washed up, as though these ideals have decayed inside of him, hollowing him into a saggy balloon-like caricature of the typical hard-boiled hero. Killers become a bit ridiculous in old age—murder is a young-man’s game, increasingly so as the reality of a bullet is replaced by ulcers or emphysema (and perhaps unintentionally, this also echoes Manchette’s broader ideas about the crime genre, which, by the seventies, already had more than a few wrinkles). Thompson, though he lacks any fully articulated psychological depth, is still one of the most intriguing elements of the novel, at least to me, following the reasoning that Don Quixote’s relationship with chivalric romances wouldn’t be as strange or interesting if he had begun his journey as an able-bodied young man. The reader inevitable senses, after spending only a few pages with Thompson, that this job will be his last.
Despite the kidnapping, shootouts, thefts, killings, and many other criminal offenses that Thompson and his men—as well as Julie—get involved with, the police have almost no involvement in the novel. The police are capitalism’s servants and therefore the enemy, even to Julie, who is being pursued by assassins: Manchette, in one brief essay, tried to encapsulate his political response to the crime novel: “Social and political power is exercised by bastards. More precisely, by unscrupulous capitalists, allies of or identical to gangsters brought together in organizations, having in their pay politicians, journalists, and other ideologues, as well as justice, the police, and other henchmen.” In this light, the fringes of society are reduced fighting with an aggressively individualistic morality—bitter existentialism with a taste for blood, and here, the law only clutters things up. The best that the criminals or Julie—who escaped from a different imposed order, the mental institution—can hope for is to escape, or having failed that, to fight the law and lose with unwavering convictions. One of the most unforgettable scenes of the novel is an example of this utter neglect for order or the law, in which a department store is set on fire by Julie, and it’s amid this pandemonium that Thompson finally finds himself truly in his element: “Fragments of plastic flew from the display. The store was filled by an intense tumult. This is exciting, I am enjoying this, Thompson told himself as he spat gastric juice onto the ground.” If Zola was the novelist of the department store, Manchette is the novelist of the destruction of the department store.
While The Mad and the Bad packs just about as much absurdity and violence as possible inside a linear, gripping narrative, it contains fewer obvious political overtones than Manchette’s other novels, or those that I’ve been able to read in English. Nada, for example—which was also published in 1972 and made into a film two years later by Claude Chabrol—follows a small gang of ideology-obsessed terrorists as they kidnap an ambassador from a brothel and escape to the countryside to hold him for ransom. The gang is a loose caricature of one of those extremist factions that sprouted up all over Europe amid the social and economic crises of the seventies and after the widespread disillusionment and failed revolutions of the sixties—for example, the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany or the Red Brigades of Italy. (Incidentally, in April 1968, four young radicals, including Andreas Baader, were arrested on the suspicion of burning two department stores in Germany—probably in some way referencing this, in The Mad and the Bad, an angry bystander mistakenly blames the department store fire on Maoists.) Nada engages directly with revolutionary politics and the justification of terrorism against the state, but in this story as well, to confuse things a bit, the mode of address shifts back and forth from farce to tragedy. Toward the very end, after everyone else has perished in a spectacular shootout, the lone surviving member of the gang announces (this quote is lifted from the subtitles of the film Nada):

The state hates terrorism, but prefers it to revolution. When each man realizes the need to destroy the State, the State tries to destroy everything . . . Thus the lone assassin becomes a type of behavior consumable by society. The State has chosen between revolt and death and hopes everyone will make the same choice. It’s a trap for revolutionaries, and I fell into it. I’m not the only one. And that makes me shit.

This speech seems to echo Manchette’s own ideals, and his own scattered revolutionary critiques, but it’s also so full of cynicism and despair that it makes for a very unclear conclusion. Similarly in another Manchette novel, Fatale, the heroine Aimée goes on a murderous rampage through the morally corrupt town of Bléville. She orchestrates a scheme to make loads of money by murdering an obsolete, trouble-making baron, but ends up feeling guilty or disgusted, and then becomes something of a resemblance to Eric Hobsbawm’s “social bandit,” or some sexier version of it: an exterminating angel and unlikely savior from capitalist greed and corruption. It’s hard to know exactly what to make of the diluted political messages in Fatale, which at one point contrasts the affluent city center’s street name Adolphe Thiers (one of the biggest enemies of the Paris Commune) to the working-class neighborhood’s street name Jean Jaurès (the celebrated socialist who was murdered on the eve of World War I), but which only partially barely elaborates Aimée’s political motivations. The Prone Gunman, too, is ostensibly about class struggle—Martin Terrier amasses a fortune as an assassin to impress his teenage sweetheart, who’s on a higher social rung than his, and he wants to quit and settle down with her, but gets trapped into pulling one last job. However, the inclusion of nymphomania, amnesia, and the assassination of a well-known public figure turn this novel into more of a hazy bloodbath. Like Manchette’s other characters, and especially Thompson of The Mad and the Bad and Aimée of Fatale, Martin Terrier is an unpredictable variation on a type of hard-boiled character, and one that is reanimated because of some derailed expectations on the part of the reader. The same can probably be said about Manchette’s political messages, which adorn his novels like a camouflage costume on a hunter.
Manchette’s novels inadvertently complicate the exchange between didacticism and entertainment. On the one hand, his writing consciously strives to become part of the tradition of ethically dangerous literature that was articulated by Georges Bataille in Literature and Evil: books that awaken the reader’s sense of fear, alienation, and repulsion, and force them to transgress everyday morality. But on the other hand, his novels are simply too entertaining and outrageous to be read as serious cultural criticism. Does it matter whether or not a reader of Manchette feels compelled to punch a cop or speak out against capitalism after finishing one of his novels? Well, probably not. Manchette would’ve liked to inspire violent impulses in his readers, or at least some sense of moral indignation, but ultimately in his work, the transgression of form becomes more interesting than the transgression of values. Particularly in The Mad and the Bad, the reader is flung into a hard-boiled plot that speeds through scenes of bloodshed, chaos, and savagery, and like Godard’s film Weekend, the depictions of destruction are more fun and enduring than their meanings. - Tynan Kogane

In America it was Hammett and Chandler: Hammett who took murder out of the manor houses and gave it back to the people who actually commit it; Chandler who fashioned of bus stations, diners, and cheap hotel rooms, at the frontier’s last raw edge, a mythology specifically American. In France the new maps were drawn by Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995).
When Manchette began to write his novels in the mid-1970s, the French polar had become a still pool of police procedurals and tales of Pigalle lowlife. Manchette wanted to throw in rocks, disturb the calm surface, bring up all the muck beneath—to demonstrate that the crime novel could be (as he said again and again) “the great moral literature of our time.”
For Manchette and the generation of writers who succeeded him, then, these novels became far more than simple entertainment; they became a means of facing society’s failures head on. One after another the curtains will be torn back. Pretense. Deceit. Manipulation. Till there in the small, choked room behind it all we witness society’s true engines—greed and violence—grinding away.
“He was like an electroshock to the chloroformed country of literature and the French thriller,” Jean-François Gérault noted.
Manchette published ten novels with Gallimard from 1971 to 1982. Before and after, he worked as an editor, reviewed movies, wrote scripts for film and TV and numerous essays on thrillers and crime fiction. He also published translations of Ross Thomas, Donald Westlake, Alan Moore, and others—at least thirty books. By 1989, treatment of and complications from a pancreatic tumor made work difficult. He died in 1995 in Paris of lung cancer, aged fifty-three, before completing a new novel, La Princesse du sang (Princess of the Blood), intended to be the first of a five-book cycle covering five decades from the postwar period to the present.
The Mad and the Bad, original title Ô dingos, Ô châteaux!, came early in the game, in 1972, following close upon the prior year’s collaborative Laissez bronzer les cadavres (Corpses in the Sun, with Jean-Pierre Bastid) and solo L’Affaire N’Gustro (The N’Gustro Affair), and won the grand prize for crime fiction in 1973.
The Mad and the Bad’s tale of a young woman and a boy set upon by deadly forces beyond their understanding shows the co-opting of classic noir plots that we see in all Manchette’s novels. In Three to Kill a businessman witnesses a murder and, pursued by the killers, steps away from his ordinary life to turn the killing back on them. In The Prone Gunman a hired killer yearning to give it all up returns catastrophically to his hometown. The pleasure lies in the many ways Manchette twists and turns his story on the spit of plot, how he transforms the expected, how much weight he manages to pack into scenes that remain lean and muscular. Things move fast, almost at a blur—then excruciatingly slow. Sentences are clipped, headlong. Charged language everywhere, sometimes to the point of the incantatory.
Here also are Manchette’s trademark disavowed individuals, ill-fitting stones in societal walls that will crumble at the first wayward blow.

“The nursemaid before you. Completely off her rocker. Fifty if she was a day. And an idiot. What about you? What’s your thing?”
“I don’t understand at all,” said Julie. “My thing? What do you mean?”
“The thing that’s screwy with you.”
“I’m cured,” Julie stated.
“The hell you are!” exclaimed the driver. “The boss’s way of doing good is over the top. He only hires retards. He sets up factories for cripples to work in, can you figure that?”
“Not really.”
“Those guys who go around in little motorized wheelchairs? He’s got them working on a production line! In this house it’s the same baloney. The cook is epileptic. The gardener has only one arm, pretty handy for using the shears. His private secretary is blind. His valet suffers from locomotor ataxia—no wonder his meals arrive cold! The snotty brat’s old nanny—well, I told you about her. As for you, you must know yourself.”
“What about you?” asked Julie.
She had taken out a pack of Gauloises and a Criquet lighter. She lit a cigarette and, throwing her head back, blew smoke through her nostrils.
“What about you?” she repeated.

A parade of grotesquerie, dialogue rich in subtext, and a parody of labor in capitalist society—all in less than a page.
There’s much that’s quintessentially French about Manchette: his political stance, the stylish hard surface of his prose, his adoption of a “low” or demotic art form to embody abstract ideas. Like any great illusionist, he directs our attention one way as the miraculous happens in another. He tells us a simple story. This occurred. That. But there’s bone, there’s gristle. Floors give way, and wind heaves its shoulder against the door. His stories of cornered individuals become an indictment of capitalism’s excesses, its unchallenged power, its reliance on distraction and spectacle.
For Manchette the world is a giant marketplace in which gangs of thugs—be they leftist, reactionary, terrorist, police, or politicians—compete relentlessly; one in which tiny groups of individuals, “torn to pieces by the enemy and sodomized by [their] own leaders,” stay afloat by clinging to the flotsam. In his work he alludes to and parodies literary writers such as Baudelaire and Stendhal, juxtaposes the vulgar and the precious, enjambs depictions of quotidian life against scenes of such extreme and often implicit violence as to call into question all the myriad fictions of bourgeois, accepted existence. Like Hammett, he affirms that everyone lies; like Rimbaud, that everything we are taught is false.
Manchette revered Chandler and Hammett as founders of the form in which he worked, and in Chandler’s lyrical description from “The Simple Art of Murder” found a world he well recognized:

The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing….
It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.

Though dredged from the same dark sense of purloined promise as Chandler’s, Manchette’s profoundly leftist, distinctly European stance may be something of a problem for American readers. Like many of his generation, Manchette was influenced by the Situationist Guy Debord, whose theories, elaborated in The Society of the Spectacle, were everywhere during France’s 1968 insurrections. Situationists held that capitalism’s overweening successes came only at the expense of increased alienation, social dysfunction, and a general degradation of daily life; that the acquisition, exchange, and consumption of commodities had forcefully supplanted direct experience, creating a kind of life by proxy; and that liberation might be found in fashioning moments that reawakened authentic desires, a sense of adventure, a ransom from dailiness.
Again and again one finds similar ideas in Manchette, here as a loose scaffolding holding story parts together, there like bones poking through broken skin. Manchette’s stories clip along at breakneck speed, breath be damned, skimming over polarized societies and forfeited lives, momentum never flagging. And in that disjunction, lightness of surface supporting the heaviness beneath, Manchette found his voice.
Back in the hills of the rural South where I grew up, squirrel hunters often nailed their game to trees and, with a knife and brute strength, tore the body from the skin in a single hard pull. As a method it was clean, quick, and efficient. The skins stayed behind on the trees, dozens of them, all around cabins and favorite hunting sites, constant reminders.
Books like Manchette’s are those skins. - James Sallis
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jun/18/manchette-into-muck/

---

The Mad and the Bad

by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Chapter 0
The man whom Thompson was supposed to kill—a pederast guilty of seducing the son of a businessman—entered his bedroom. As he closed the door behind him, he had time to recoil at the sight of Thompson standing against the wall beside the hinges. Then Thompson stabbed him in the heart with a rigid hacksaw blade mounted on a large cylindrical hilt with a circular sheet-metal guard. While the guard prevented the blood from spurting, Thompson pumped the cylindrical hilt vigorously, and the homosexual’s heart was sliced into two or more pieces. The victim opened his mouth and a single spasm shook him. His rump struck the door and he slumped forward dead. Thompson stepped aside. For the last half hour his stomach cramps had grown almost intolerable. He left the bedroom. No one had seen him enter; no one saw him leave. It was two o’clock in the morning. Thompson had an appointment in Paris at eleven. He made his way on foot to the Perrache railroad station. The cramps had him almost doubled over. The killer resolved to give up his trade. Soon. Every time it was worse. For the last ten hours he had been unable to eat or drink anything. Now that he had killed, hunger gnawed at him in the most repellent way. Eventually he reached the station buffet. He ordered a choucroute and devoured it. He ordered another, which he savored. His stomach had calmed down. His mind likewise: Thompson had just earned a tidy sum of money. It was three in the morning. The killer paid his bill, returned to his gray Rover, which was parked at a meter, and headed for the autoroute A6.
Later on, somewhere between Lyon and Paris, he pulled off into a rest area and snoozed until daybreak.
At eleven in the morning he was prompt for his appointment. His new client wore dark glasses and Thompson smiled at this childishness. Seated in a booth, the two men drank Scottish beer. The new client placed a photograph facedown on the table.
“It’s going to be a bit tricky,” he said. “It will have to look as though…well, I’ll explain. What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?”
Thompson was massaging his belly.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” he replied.
He turned the photograph over. It was a color snapshot. A half-length portrait of a redheaded boy with a sullen expression.
“Does this bother you?”
“Not at all,” said Thompson.
What bothered him was his stomach. It was starting again. The pain was back.

—Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith

Jean-Patrick Manchette, Fatale. Trans by. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York Review Books Classics, 2011.



Whether you call her a coldhearted grifter or the soul of modern capitalism, there’s no question that Aimée is a killer and a more than professional one. Now she’s set her eyes on a backwater burg—where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous) newcomer to town, she means to sniff out old grudges and engineer new opportunities, deftly playing different people and different interests against each other the better, as always, to make a killing. But then something snaps: the master manipulator falls prey to a pure and wayward passion.
Aimée has become the avenging angel of her own nihilism, exacting the destruction of a whole society of destroyers. An unholy original, Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the modern detective novel into a weapon of gleeful satire and anarchic fun. In Fatale he mixes equal measures of farce, mayhem, and madness to prepare a rare literary cocktail that packs a devastating punch.
                          


Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–1995) was a genre-redefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, critic, and translator. Born in Marseille to a family of relatively modest means, Manchette grew up in a southwestern suburb of Paris, where he wrote from an early age. While a student of English literature at the Sorbonne, he contributed articles to the newspaper La Voie communiste and became active in the national students’ union. In 1961 he married, and with his wife Mélissa began translating American crime fiction—he would go on to translate the works of such writers as Donald Westlake, Ross Thomas, and Margaret Millar, often for Gallimard’s Série noire. Throughout the 1960s Manchette supported himself with various jobs writing television scripts, screenplays, young-adult books, and film novelizations. In 1971 he published his first novel, a collaboration with Jean-Pierre Bastid, and embarked on his literary career in earnest, producing ten subsequent works over the course of the next two decades and establishing a new genre of French novel, the néo-polar (distinguished from traditional detective novel, or polar, by its political engagement and social radicalism). During the 1980s, Manchette published celebrated translations of Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novels for a bande-dessinée publishing house co-founded by his son, Doug Headline. In addition to Fatale (also available as an NYRB Classic), Manchette’s novels Three to Kill and The Prone Gunman, as well as Jacques Tardi’s graphic-novel adaptations of them (titled West Coast Blues and Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot, respectively), are available in English.

FBI•MINI #11: Unfinished Fatale

Jacques Tardi & Jean-Patrick Manchette A legendary lost comic! Tardi's unfinished adaptation of Manchette's beautiful-hired-assassin novel Fatale, in English for the first time!  Product Details...                      
  

Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot

Jacques Tardi & Jean-Patrick Manchette Tardi, in top form, adapts Manchette's novel for another neo-noir classic — a spectacularly dark, violent and fast-paced crime thriller.  Product Details...                      
 

Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell

Jacques Tardi & Jean-Patrick Manchette Another kick-ass noir thriller by the acclaimed duo. A rich industrialist tries to frame the new nanny for kidnapping his son; it goes wrong; he sets a dangerous killer after them; all hell breaks loose.  Product Details...