The Real Cool Killers
Out of the Past, Double Indemnity, Detour, D.O.A.—through titles and across content, classic noir semaphores repetition, impasse, entanglement, and terminus. The elegantly brutal, deadpan crime fictions of Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–1995), created in the reverberation of the events of May 1968 in Paris, exploded those distress signals into static and silence. A socialist from Marseille who began drifting around dissident Communist and Trotskyite fringes, the translator of American hard-boiled novels and the author of Notes noires columns for French newspapers and journals, Manchette crafted