Jean-Patrick Manchette
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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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. His stories are violent, existentialist 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. His books are reminiscent of the nouvelle vague crime films of Jean-Pierre Melville, employing a similarly cool, existential style on a typically American genre (film noir for Melville and pulp novels for Manchette).
Three of his 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"]). A third, Fatale, was released by New York Review Books Classics in 2011. In 2009, Fantagraphics Books released an English language version of French cartoonist Jacques Tardi's adaptation of Le petit bleu, under the new English title West Coast Blues. Fantagraphics will release a second Tardi adaptation, of "La Position du tireur couché" (under the title "Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot" ) in the summer of 2011.
Source
- Benoît Mouchart, Manchette, le nouveau roman noir, éditions Séguier-Archimbaud, 2006
