An NYRB Classics Original
Winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Fiction
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 a serious ulcer. Michel hires Julie to look after Peter. And he hires Thompson to kill them. Julie and Peter escape. Thompson pursues. 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.
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 Voie 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, 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
bande-dessinée publishing house co-founded by his son, Doug Headline. In addition to
Fatale (also available as an NYRB Classic), 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 Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Raoul Vaneigem, Antonin Artaud, Jean Laplanche, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Guy Debord. For NYRB Classics he has translated Manchette's
Fatale and is presently working on Jean-Paul Clébert's
Paris Insolite. Born in Manchester, England, he is a longtime resident of New York City.
James Sallis's recent and forthcoming books include the novel
Others of My Kind, a reissue of his novel
Death Will Have Your Eyes, and
Black Night's Gonna Catch Me Here: Selected Poems 1968-2012. He is also the author of
Drive and of
Chester Himes: A Life, and the translator of Raymond Queneau's novel
Saint Glinglin.
