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 Voix 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, pornographic 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 bandes-dessinée publishing house co-founded by his son, Doug
Headline. In addition to Fatale, 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.
Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translations of noir fiction include
Manchette’s Three to Kill, Thierry Jonquet’s Mygale (a.k.a.
Tarantula), and (with Alyson Waters) Yasmina Khadra’s Cousin K. He
has also translated works by Guy Debord, Paco Ignacio Taibo II ,
Henri Lefebvre, Antonin Artaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire. Born in
Manchester, England, he is a longtime resident of New York
City.
Jean Echenoz is a prominent French novelist, many of whose works
have been translated into English, among them Chopin’s Move (1989),
Big Blondes (1995), and most recently Ravel (2008) and
Running (2009).
“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, Author of Expiration Date
“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 their main characters’ lives and gleefully
recording the anarchy that results.”
—Jennifer Howard, Boston Review
“Cool, compact, and shockingly original.”
—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times
“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. . . . [H]e’s a
massive figure. . . . There is gristle here, there is bone.”
—The Boston Globe
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