After the protests of May 1968, Jean-Patrick Manchette began writing a cycle of hard-boiled romans noirs. Involved with the French ultra-left since his adolescence, Manchette aimed to rehabilitate the genre. Steeped in American crime fiction, Manchette’s work imported the Situationist critique and other ultra-left discourse into what was then considered perhaps the lowest of all mass-produced literature.

Translator Donald Nicholson-Smith has done more than anyone else to bring Manchette to English-language readers. Last summer, New York Review Books Classics published Nicholson-Smith’s