The Mad and the Bad - Jean-Patrick Manchette

The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, intro by James Sallis / ISBN 9781590177204 / 184-page paperback published by NYRB Classics *** 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. Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) was a genre-redefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, cr