Skeletons in the Closet

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Eugéne Tarpon, the private-eye protagonist from Manchette’s No Room at the Morgue, appears once more for a characteristically brisk and brutal story full of unexpected comedy and feeling.

Private eye Eugéne Tarpon is back to sleeping in his office, waiting for a paying job to turn up. Then he gets a call from a sometime contact in the police department. He’s referring a nice old lady—a distant relative—to Tarpon; her daughter’s gone missing and, the copy says, there’s no finding her. There are no leads. She’s gone. But the old lady’s pigheaded. Do me a favor, he tells Tarpon. Humor her. Take her off our hands. Take her money, too. And, by the way, there’s no need to investigate the actual business at all.

Tarpon may be down and out, but he’s too much of a gentleman for that. Plus, fed an obviously fishy story, he doesn’t have it in him to let well enough alone.

Once again, Tarpon is making a very big mistake.“I’m already on record saying that I’d rather read the French noir writer — even one of his less-than-successful efforts — than most contemporary genre writers, and Skeletons in the Closet…is up there with his brutal best.” —Sarah Weinman, The New York Times

“Manchette—polymath, chess whiz, jazz superenthusiast, comic-book lover, literary genius….He compels us to examine the stories we tell ourselves in light of the bigger oppressive stories unfolding around us, to think about history as something we collectively make as well as something that makes us.” —Gary Indiana

“Jean-Patrick 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

“Writing so dark it gives a new meaning to the world noir.” —Frederick MézièsJean-Patrick Manchette (1942–1995) was a genre-redefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, critic, and translator. 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 detective novel. NYRB Classics publishes his Fatale, The Mad and the Bad, Ivory Pearl, Nada, The N’Gustro Affair, and No Room at the Morgue.

Alyson Waters is a prize-winning translator of literary fiction from French to English. She has translated A King Alone by Jean Giono, Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery, No Room at the Morgue by Jean-Patrick Manchette, and Henri Duchemin and His Shadows by Emmanuel Bove, all available from NYRB Classics. For NYRB Kids, she has translated Our Fort by Marie Dorléans and The Tiger Prince by Chen Jiang Hong.  She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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