Jean-Patrick Manchette


Jean-Patrick Manchette 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 the 1970s - 1980s. 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.
Seven of his eleven novels have been translated into English. Two were published by San Francisco publisher City Lights Books—3 To Kill and The Prone Gunman. Five other novels, Fatale, The Mad and the Bad, Ivory Pearl, Nada, and No Room at the Morgue have been 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" in the summer of 2011, and a third one, of "Ô Dingos! Ô Châteaux!" in January 2015. Manchette himself 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 the southern suburbs of Paris. Growing up in a relatively modest family, he proved to be an excellent pupil and from an early age showed a keen taste for writing. During his childhood and teen years, he wrote hundreds of pages of pastiches of war memoirs or science fiction novels, gradually turning into attempts at "serious" fiction.
A compulsive reader, passionate lover of American film and jazz music, he also developed a lifelong interest in chess and all types of strategy games. While his parents envisioned a teaching career for him, to their great dismay he suddenly dropped out of his studies at 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. Trying to achieve this, in 1965 he began a series of numerous and diverse menial writing jobs: scripts for short films, various treatments, and two low-budget films for director Max Pecas. In 1968, he first encountered success writing scripts and dialogue for eleven episodes of popular television series . Concurrently, he wrote novelizations of several films, 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 novels by Robert Littell, crime fiction or books about film.
All these jobs, while barely earning him a living, also 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 towards 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 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, written with, and L'Affaire N'Gustro. 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!, 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 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 and Que d'os!. 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". 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-hire who shatters the apparent quietness of a small seaside town with devastating results. The book was rejected by the Série Noire as too literary and released as a mainstream novel. Manchette qualified this as an "experimental novel" more than a thriller.
In 1981, he wrote "La Position du Tireur Couché", a radical behaviorist writing experience based on a classic Noir theme. Martin Terrier, a young hitman eager to retire, becomes a victim of the world he lives in. His attempted return to his home town ends up in mayhem, and his glamorous image is destroyed as he loses the woman he loves, the money he saved, the one friend he has left, and finally, his marksmanship. The novel has been translated from French into English by poet and editor, James Brook, and was published by City Lights Publishers in 2002. "The Prone Gunman" was named "Top Mystery Book of 2002" by the New York Times Book Review. In 2015, the novel was made into a film called The Gunman, directed by Pierre Morel, starring Sean Penn, Javier Bardem and Peter Franzen.
In the following years, while being regularly named by the press as the father of the neo-polar, Manchette no longer published novels, but kept writing for film and television, translating novels and writing articles on the detective novel and on film. He believed he had gone full circle with his last novel, which he conceived as a "closure" of his Noir fiction. Manchette explained in a 1988 letter to a journalist:
In 1989, finally having found new territory he wanted to explore, Manchette started writing a new novel, La Princesse du Sang, an international thriller, which was supposed to be the first book in a new cycle, a series of novels covering five decades from the post-war period to present times. He died from cancer before completing it.
Starting in 1996, a year after his death, several unpublished works were released, showing how very active he was in the years preceding his death.

Film and miscellaneous other writings

From 1973 on, Manchette constantly wrote for the screen. Among his filmwork are Nada, directed by Claude Chabrol and adapted from his own novel, ' , , The Police War, ', and . In addition, several of his novels were made into movies, three of which starring Alain Delon, but after Nada, Manchette chose not to work on these adaptations, in order to avoid having to change his own stories. His love of film writing and great sense of dialogue, however, led him to contribute to many film projects a very uneven interest, often adapted from other crime novelists. And he worked on a great many projects which never materialized. He also occasionally wrote for television, such as the TV drama Série noire in the 1980s.
Manchette firmly believed translation to be noble work and he kept doing it throughout his life. Between 1970 and 1995, he translated thirty novels, including books by Donald E. Westlake, Robert Bloch, Ross Thomas and the graphic novel Watchmen. He also wrote a comic album Griffu for cartoonist Jacques Tardi, a couple of children's books, wrote prefaces, notes on books, essays and drama. In addition to his novels and his work for the movies, Manchette also kept a daily diary from 1965 to 1995, which ultimately runs for over five thousand handwritten pages.
Among his many other activities, at various times in his life, Manchette was also the editor of a line of science fiction novels, wrote a column on mind games under the pen name General-Baron Staff, served as editor of a weekly comics magazine, film critic and columnist on crime fiction under the pen name Shuto Headline. With his essays on Noir fiction, he proved himself one of the major theorists of genre literature.

Posthumous releases

After his death, from 1996 on, came out his last unfinished novel, Princesse du Sang, as well as collections of his articles on Noir fiction, crime fiction and the detective novel, Chroniques, his articles about film, Les Yeux de la Momie and his only theatrical play, Cache ta joie!, chapters from abandoned novels like Iris, an unpublished screenplay, Mishaps and decomposition of the Dance of Death Company and a volume of his diaries, Journal covering the years 1966 to 1974. These releases have confirmed Manchette's influence on the French literary scene. His novels are currently enjoying renewed interest and have now been translated into a great many languages worldwide.

Novels