JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE (1942–1995) was a genre-redefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, critic, and translator. Born in Marseilles to a family of relatively modest means, Manchette grew up in a southwestern suburb of Paris, where he began writing at an early age. While a student of English literature at the Sorbonne, he contributed articles to the newspaper La Voie communiste. 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 works over the course of the next two decades and establishing a new genre of French novel, the néo-polar (distinguished from the traditional detective novel, or polar, by its political engagement and social radicalism). During the 1980s, Manchette published a translation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel for a bande-dessinée publishing house co-founded by his son, Doug Headline. In addition to Fatale, The Mad and the Bad, Ivory Pearl, Nada, and No Room at the Morgue (all available from NYRB Classics), 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 Jean-Patrick 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 he has translated Manchette’s Fatale, Ivory Pearl, Nada, and The Mad and the Bad (winner of the 2014 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Fiction), and Jean-Paul Clébert’s Paris Vagabond, as well as the French comics The Green Hand by Nicole Claveloux and Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures by Yvan Alagbé. Born in Manchester, England, he is a longtime resident of New York City.

GARY INDIANA is a critic and novelist. His most recent books include I Can Give You Anything But Love, a memoir, and Tiny Fish That Only Want to Kiss, a collection of short fiction. His writing has appeared in New York magazine, The New York Times, Vice, the London Review of Books, and many other publications.