The Mad and the Bad

by Jean-Patrick Manchette, James Sallis (Introduction), Donald Nicholson-Smith (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590177204
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	07/15/2014
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.02(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.42(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

"[Manchette's] writing is lean and relentless, a brutal evocation of a world in which conventional morality is just another lie we tell ourselves...The Mad and the Bad is so dark it redefines noir: bleak and pointed, yes, but also infused with an understanding that what passes between us is not only compromised but more often faithless, less a matter of commitment or connection than a kind of unrelenting animal need." —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times 
"A beautiful woman is freed from an insane asylum by a rich philanthropist who wants her to care for his nephew. But when the nanny and her charge are kidnapped, it’s not the ransom plot it appears—in fact, as they escape and flee the gunmen hired to kill them, the truth of the situation is clearly a metaphor for the left-leaning author’s deep cynicism about French society. Scenes play out like an art film—Manchette was also a screenwriter—right up until the prolonged, blood-splattered finale." —Booklist

“Jean-Patrick Manchette: raconteur, bon vivant, leftist militant, agent provocateur, swinger, French crime kingpin, gadfly foe of the Fifth Republic. Man-oh-man Manchette was a decades-long hurricane through the Parisian cultural scene. We must revere him now and rediscover him this very instant. Jean-Patrick Manchette was Le Homme.” —James Ellroy

“This early masterpiece by Jean-Patrick Manchette shows him in most glorious, coldest fury, wrapping a scathing critique of the excesses of greed and capitalism in the bloody bow of a chase thriller. You’ll want to turn the pages of The Mad and the Bad at the fastest possible clip, but slow down a little and you’ll see how much Manchette packs in—and how much of a punch this mean little book packs.” —Sarah Weinman, Editor of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives

“‘The crime novel,’ [Manchette] claimed, ‘is the great moral literature of our time’—shortly before he set about proving it.” —James Sallis, The Boston Globe

“In France, which long ago embraced American crime fiction, thrillers are referred to as polars. And in France the godfather and wizard of polars is Jean-Patrick Manchette.... He’s a massive figure.... There is gristle here, there is bone.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Manchette is legend among all of the crime writers I know, and with good reason: his novels never fail to stun and thrill from page one.” —Duane Swierczynski, author of Expiration Date
 
“Manchette pushes the Situationist strategy of dérive and détournement to the point of comic absurdity, throwing a wrench into the workings of his main characters’ lives and gleefully recording the anarchy that results.” —Jennifer Howard, Boston Review

"Manchette...was instrumental in the development of a new generation of French crime fiction—the néo-polar—with his unpredictable, fast-paced, politically informed novels...[The Mad and the Bad] is violent, swiftly paced, and grotesquely funny." —The New Yorker

"A writer of urgency and cunning, of economy and laconic cool." —Chris Morgan, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Manchette is an impressively economical writer, lean and mean, with a single-mindedness of focus which permits just enough detail to make the stories palpable but precludes distractions.”
—Medium

"Building upon the hard-boiled genre and creating an offshoot of his own called the néo-polar, Manchette was a sincere but complicated trickster, a writer who claimed that detective fiction was 'the great moral literature of our time,' who wanted to use the genre to expose the pitfalls of capitalism and the victims of the exploited classes...and who produced thin novels that are very entertaining and stylistically singular.” —Tynan Kogane, Music and Literature

[Manchette’s] writing is lean and relentless, a brutal evocation of a world in which conventional morality is just another lie we tell ourselves...The Mad and the Bad is so dark it redefines noir: bleak and pointed, yes, but also infused with an understanding that what passes between us is not only compromised but more often faithless, less a matter of commitment or connection than a kind of unrelenting animal need.
—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
 

From the Publisher

2014-07-02
A young beauty sprung from an insaneasylum, a hired killer with a bad case of workplace anxiety, a calculatingphilanthropist and his orphaned nephew create nonstop havoc in this 1972 Frenchnovel, translated into English for the first time.The opening scene might lead you toexpect the grisliest kind of pulp fiction: The killer, Thompson,overcoming severe stomach cramps, shoves a hacksaw blade into the heart of asuspected pederast. And there certainly is no shortage of extreme violence.Right up until the end, people are getting shot, stabbed and bonked in the headwith heavy objects, a department store is left in flames, and the Frenchcountryside is at risk from speeding vehicles. But this is at heart amerciless comedy in which every violent act and utterance carries the potentialof hilarity. Julie, the beauty hired to care for the increasingly unstableyoung orphan, is a piece of work the likes of which we've never seen—lethal andmaternal. Manchette, who died in 1995, was a master of control. The fiercedeadpan tone of the novel never wavers even as its gang of criminalsdemonstrates its inability to shoot straight. As in a Jacques Tati film, sheerlunacy propels the story, one outrageous mishap triggering another. Set in the'70s, the book is on one level a sendup of classic noir, but it's no spoof,existing in its own perverse universe.A minor masterpiece from a Frenchnovelist whose other recently reissued works include Fatale and TheProne Gunman.

Kirkus Reviews