Jean Patrick Manchette Popular Books

Jean Patrick Manchette Biography & Facts

Jean-Patrick Manchette (19 December 1942, Marseille – 3 June 1995, Paris) was a French crime novelist credited with reinventing and reinvigorating the genre. He wrote ten short novels in the seventies and early eighties, and is widely recognized as the foremost French crime fiction author of that period. His stories are violent explorations of the human condition and French society. Manchette was politically to the left and his writing reflects this through his analysis of social positions and culture. Eight of his eleven novels have been translated into English. Two were published by San Francisco publisher City Lights Books—3 To Kill (from the French Le petit bleu de la côte ouest) and The Prone Gunman (from the French La Position du tireur couché). Five other novels, Fatale, The Mad and the Bad (from the French O dingos, O chateaux!), Ivory Pearl (from the French La Princesse du Sang), Nada, and No Room at the Morgue were released by New York Review Books Classics in 2011, 2014, 2018, 2019, and 2020 respectively. In 2009, Fantagraphics Books released an English-language version of French cartoonist Jacques Tardi's adaptation of Le petit bleu de la côte ouest, under the new English title West Coast Blues. Fantagraphics released a second Tardi adaptation, of "La Position du tireur couché" (under the title "Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot" ) in 2011, and a third one, of "Ô Dingos! Ô Châteaux!" (under the title "Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell") in 2015. Manchette was a fan of comics, and his praised translation of Alan Moore's Watchmen into French remains in print. Youth and early writings Born December 19, 1942, in Marseille, where the war had temporarily led his parents, Jean-Patrick Manchette spent most of his early years in Malakoff, in Paris's southern suburbs. Growing up in a relatively modest family (his father started out as a factory worker, later to become an electronics sales executive), he was an excellent pupil and from an early age showed keen interest in writing. During his childhood and adolescence, he wrote hundreds of pages of pastiches of war memoirs and science fiction novels, gradually turning to attempts at "serious" fiction. A compulsive reader, passionate lover of American film and jazz (he played the tenor and alto saxophone), he also developed a lifelong interest in chess and other strategy games. While his parents envisioned a teaching career for him, to their great dismay he dropped out of the ENS without graduating, and decided to try and earn a living writing. He went to England to teach French for one semester in a college for the blind at Worcester, then returned to France. A left-wing activist during the War of Algeria in the early 1960s, he was at that time very much influenced by the writings of the Situationist International. His first goal was to become a screenwriter. To achieve this, in 1965 he began a series of diverse menial writing jobs: scripts for short films, various treatments, and two low-budget films for director Max Pecas (Woman beleaguered / The Prisoner of Desire and Fear and Love). In 1968, he first encountered success writing scripts and dialogue for 11 episodes of the popular TV series The Globetrotters. Concurrently, he wrote novelizations of several films (Mourir d'aimer, Sacco and Vanzetti), novels derived from episodes of The Globetrotters, fiction for kids, espionage novels, and even an erotic novel, all under pen names. Alone or with his wife Melissa, he also translated two dozen English-language novels, mostly by Robert Littell, crime fiction and books about film, including memoirs of Pola Negri and biographies of Humphrey Bogart and The Marx Brothers. These jobs, while barely earning him a living, kept him away from the screenwriting work he was aiming for. Turning to novels then appeared to be the next step, as he figured once his novels were in print, studios might be interested in turning them into film. He thus envisioned writing his first novel as a path toward writing for film. Major novels Manchette chose to write noir fiction as he already had great love for the genre and admired the "behaviorist" style of Dashiell Hammett. He sent out his first novel, L'Affaire N'Gustro (The N'Gustro Affair) to a mainstream publisher at the end of 1969. While working on a second one with a fellow writer, he was advised to take it to famous crime fiction imprint Série Noire at Éditions Gallimard. There, his novel elicited much interest and was accepted. Nine of Manchette's eleven novels were published by the Série Noire. In 1971 his first two novels were released, Laissez bronzer les Cadavres (Corpses in the sun), written with Jean-Pierre Bastid, and L'Affaire N'Gustro (The N'Gustro Affair). These novels marked the kickoff of the movement Manchette himself later on called the "neo-polar," a radical departure in crime fiction from the formulaic French cops-and-robbers novels of the 1950s and '60s. Here, Manchette used the crime thriller as a springboard for social criticism. This trend was clearly exemplified by L'Affaire N'Gustro, which was directly inspired by the 1965 Paris abduction of Ben Barka, leader of the Moroccan left-wing opposition, by Moroccan intelligence with the covert help of French secret services. In 1972, Manchette published O dingos, O chateaux! (Run like Crazy Run like Hell), in which a fragile young woman and a boy, the nephew of a billionaire, are chased by a psychopathic killer and his henchmen. This chase punctuated by sudden outbursts of violence is also another opportunity for him to criticize contemporary social woes. The novel went on to win the French Grand Prix of crime fiction for the year 1973. 1972 saw Manchette releasing Nada, an examination of the kidnapping of a U.S. ambassador by a small group of left-wing activists, and the ensuing takedown of that group by the police. After an unusual take on the western genre, L'Homme au Boulet rouge (The Red Ball Gang) derived from an unfilmed screenplay by American screenwriter B.J. Sussman, Manchette then wrote two novels using the character of private eye Eugene Tarpon, Morgue pleine (Crowded day at the Morgue) and Que d'os! (It's raining bones!). Tarpon is a French private detective, a former cop responsible for the death of a protester, eaten up by grief, with a wry and weary outlook on the world, who gets mixed up in very tangled cases à la Raymond Chandler, another of Manchette's favorite writers. Out of 1976 came "Le Petit Bleu de la Côte Ouest" (3 to Kill / West Coast Blues). In this novel, Georges Gerfaut, an ordinary corporate executive, witnesses a murder, and unwittingly becomes a target for the killers. He abruptly leaves his family and his oh-so-perfect life for a while, before returning to the fold once his brutal adventure has ended. Brimming with references to West Coast jazz and full of memorable set pieces, this novel is a landmark in Manchette's output. Next came Fatale, the story of Aimée Joubert, a female killer-for-.... Discover the Jean Patrick Manchette popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Jean Patrick Manchette books.