Jean-Patrick Manchette

Aimâee, an assassin, goes into a coastal town and manipulates the town's wealthy citizens into hiring her to kill the weakest link, but when she develops sympathy for the target, she decides to retaliate against her clients instead.

Fatale

"Michel Hartog, a sometime architect, is a powerful businessman and famous philanthropist whose immense fortune has just grown that much greater following the death of his brother in an accident. Peter is his orphaned nephew--a spoiled brat. Julie is in an insane asylum. Thompson is a hired gunman with an ulcerated gut. Michel, known for his kindly interest in the disadvantaged, hires Julie to look after Peter. And he hires Thompson to kill them. Julie and Peter escape. Thompson, gut groaning, pursues. Hunter and hunted make their way across France to the remote mountain estate to which Michel has retreated. Bullets fly. Bodies accumulate. The craziness is just getting started. Like Jean-Patrick Manchette's celebrated Fatale, The Mad and the Bad is a clear-eyed, cold-blooded, pitch-perfect work of creative destruction"--

The Mad and the Bad

"Nada is the most overtly political of Jean-Patrick Manchette's dark thrillers, a critique of the terrorism that tempted a sliver of the ultra-left in France (and elsewhere) in the wake of the disillusions of 1968. The novel chronicles the kidnapping and eventual killing of an American ambassador by an anarcho-terrorist group who have espoused armed struggle. A rough equivalent to this story might be the saga of the ill-fated Symbionese Liberation Army in California, whose fiery elimination is reminiscent of the police massacre of Manchette's fictional direct-action group in Nada. The novel is in no sense a political pamphlet, however, and readers who have come to appreciate the very special qualities of Manchette's writing, and the cool noir style that he inherits in part from Dashiell Hammett and calls 'behaviorist,' will not be disappointed in the tour de force that is Nada"

Nada

Inspired by the works of Dashiell Hammett, No Room at the Morgue is Jean-Patrick Manchette's unparalleled take on the private eye novel — fierce, politically inflected, and finely rendered by the haunting, pitch-black prose for which the author is famed. No Room at the Morgue came out after Jean-Patrick Manchette had transformed French crime fiction with such brilliantly plotted, politically charged, unrelentingly violent tales as Nada and The Mad and the Bad. Here, inspired by his love of Dashiell Hammett, Manchette introduces Eugene Tarpon, private eye, a sometime cop who has set up shop after being kicked off the force for accidentally killing a political demonstrator. Months have passed, and Tarpon desultorily tries to keep in shape while drinking all the time. No one has shown up at the door of his office in the midst of the market district of Les Halles. Then the bell rings and a beautiful woman bursts in, her hands dripping blood. It’s Memphis Charles, her roommate’s throat has been cut, and Memphis can’t go to the police because they’ll only suspect her. Can Tarpon help? Well, somehow he can’t help trying. Soon bodies mount, and the craziness only grows.

No Room at the Morgue

Martin Terrier is a hired killer who wants out of the game-so he can settle down and marry his childhood sweetheart. After all, that's why he took up this profession! But the Organization won't let him go: they have other plans. Once again, the...

City Lights Noir

The Prone Gunman

Businessman Georges Gerfaut witnesses a murder-and is pursued by the killers. His conventional life knocked off the rails, Gerfaut turns the tables and sets out to track down his pursuers. Along the way, he learns a thing or two about himself......

Three To Kill

Set in Cuba's Sierra Maestra in the 1950s, in the days leading up to the Revolution--Manchette's unfinished masterpiece with a fearless female protagonist. Out of the wreckage of World War II swaggers Ivory Pearl, so named (rhymes with girl) by some British soldiers who made her their mascot, a mere kid, orphaned, survivor of God knows what, but fluent in French, English, smoking, and drinking. In Berlin, Ivy meets Samuel Farakhan, a rich closeted intelligence officer. Farakhan proposes to adopt her and help her to become the photographer she wants to be; his relationship to her will provide a certain cover for him. And she is an asset. The deal is struck... 1956: Ivy has seen every conflict the postwar world has on offer, from Vietnam to East Berlin, and has published her photographs in slick periodicals, but she is sick to death of death and bored with life and love. It’s time for a break. Ivy heads to Cuba, the Sierra Maestra. History, however, doesn’t take vacations. Ivory Pearl was Jean-Patrick Manchette’s last book, representing a new turn in his writing. It was to be the first of a series of ambitious historical thrillers about the “wrong times” we live in. Though left unfinished when Manchette died, the book, whose full plot has been filled in here from the author’s notes, is a masterpiece of bold suspense and black comedy: chilling, caustic, and perfectly choreographed.

Ivory Pearl

Jean-Pierre Bastid

Un petit hameau isolé, à moitié en ruine, grillé par le soleil de plomb du midi de la France. Luce, l'excentrique maîtresse des lieux, peintre et anarchiste, s'y alcoolise avec panache tout en regrettant sa turbulente jeunesse. Pour chasser ce vague à l'âme, le meilleur moyen est encore de recevoir tous ceux qui s'invitent à l'improviste sans leur poser de questions. Et cela, même si deux cent cinquante kilos d'or ont disparu à dix kilomètres de là dans l'attaque sanglante d'un fourgon. Certes, les nouveaux venus n'ont vraiment rien de conventionnel, mais qu'importe ! Il suffit pour compléter le tableau qu'un innocent gendarme prenne le chemin du hameau, et toute cette joyeuse population se retrouve à orchestrer un bal diablement plus mouvementé que celui du 14 Juillet…

Laissez bronzer les cadavres !

Saadet Özen

Keskin nişancı

Adaptation et dessin de Jacques Tardi. D'après les romans de Jean-Patrick Manchette.

Le petit bleu de la côte ouest ; O dingos, ô chateaux ; La position du tireur couché ; Griffu

Manchette - Tardi, l'intégrale

Jacques Tardi

The first of two volumes presenting all of the world-renowned hardboiled crime graphic novels (one of which has never before been collected in English!). In the never-before-collected Griffu, the titular character is a legal advisor, not a private eye, but even he knows that when a sultry blonde appears in his office after hours, he shouldn't trust her ― and she doesn't disappoint. Griffu is soon ensnared in a deadly web of sexual betrayal, real estate fraud, and murder. In West Coast Blues, a young sales executive goes to the aid of an accident victim, and finds himself sucked into a spiral of violence involving an exiled war criminal and two hired assassins. This volume also offers a bonus, 21-page unfinished story by Manchette and Tardi, as well as a single page introduction to another incomplete story, both appearing in English for the first time.

The Complete Graphic Noir of Machette & Tardi Vol. 1

Streets of Paris, Streets of Murder

"Manchette wrote two novels using the character of private eye Eugene Tarpon, Morgue pleine (Crowded day at the Morgue) and Que d'os! (Skeletons in the Closet!). 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"--

Skeletons in the Closet

Le journal de J.-P. Manchette (1972-1995) est composé de vingt cahiers rédigés dans un style behavioriste décrivant les seuls actes et faits, rarement les sentiments, et augmenté d'articles de presse ou de photos découpés dans divers journaux. Ce volume regroupe quatre cahiers couvrant les années 1966 à 1974, durant lesquelles Manchette décide de vivre de sa plume.

1966-1974

Journal

Hired killer Martin Terrier intends for his current job to be his last so he can return home to his girlfriend, but nothing goes as planned when a bloody shootout sends him running from the law and his former bosses.

Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot

Kim Thompson

Michel Hartog, a rich industrialist, hires a troubled young woman, Julie, straight out of the psychiatric asylum to which she has been consigned for several years - to work as a nanny for his bratty nephew Peter. But Hartog's seemingly altruistic impulse hides a darker motive. He plans to stage a fake kidnapping of his nephew and use Julie as a scapegoat. Unfortunately for Hartog, Julie proves infinitely more tough and resourceful than he expected as the kidnapping goes horribly wrong.

Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell

Deadly professional assassin Martin Terrier returns to Paris after his latest job determined to get out of the game. Ten years ago he made a promise to return to his childhood sweetheart in the south of France. But circumstances put Martin's attempted retirement on hold: a key target is flying in to Paris, and there is only one man fit for the task of eliminating him. As Martin flees southwards, desperate to return to the crushing mediocrity of life in a backwater town, he finds his former employers will stop at nothing to regain his services for one last job.Bursting with Gallic irony and visceral brutality, The Gunman (originally published in English as The Prone Gunman) is a shocking and sardonic masterpiece from the late, great master of the French crime novel, J-P Manchette.

The Gunman

The debut novel of a pioneering author of French crime thrillers. Mean, arrogant, naive, sadistic on occasion, the young Henri Butron records his life story on tape just before death catches up with him: a death passed off as a suicide by his killers, French secret service agents who need to hush up their role—and Butron’s—in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of a prominent opposition leader from a third-world African nation in the throes of a postcolonial civil war. The N’Gustro Affair is a thinly veiled retelling of the 1965 abduction and killing of Mehdi Ben Barka, a radical opponent of King Hassan II of Morocco. But this is merely the backdrop to Jean-Patrick Manchette’s first-person portrait (with shades of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me) of a man who lacks the insight to see himself for what he is: a wannabe nihilist too weak to be even a full-bore fascist.

Jean-Patrick Manchette

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