Jean-Patrick Manchette (19 December 1942, Marseille – 3 June 1995, Paris[1]) 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.
), Ivory Pearl (from the French La Princesse du Sang), Nada, No Room at the Morgue, The N'Gustro Affair, and Skeletons in the Closet were released by New York Review Books Classics in 2011, 2014, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023 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.
[citation needed] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[2] 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 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.
Among his many other activities, at various times in his life, Manchette was also the editor of a line of science fiction novels (1976-1981), wrote a column on mind games (1977-1979) under the pen name General-Baron Staff, served as editor of a weekly comics magazine (1979-1980), film critic and columnist on crime fiction (1977-1981) under the pen name Shuto Headline.
After his death, from 1996 on, came out his last unfinished novel, Princesse du Sang (Blood Princess), as well as collections of his articles on Noir fiction, crime fiction and the detective novel, Chroniques (Chronicles), his articles about film, Les Yeux de la Momie (The Mummy's Eyes) 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.