The Mad and the Bad

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 an ulcerated gut.

Michel, known for his kindly interest in the disadvantaged, hires Julie to look after Peter.

And he hires Thompson to kill them.

Julie and Peter escape. Thompson, gut groaning, pursues.

Hunter and hunted make their way across France to the remote mountain estate to which Michel has retreated.

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, critic, and translator. Throughout the 1960s he supported himself by writing television scripts, 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 subsequent works over the course of the next two decades and establishing a new genre of French novel, the neo-polar (distinguished from the traditional detective novel, or polar, by its political engagement and social radicalism). In addition to The Mad and the Bad, the Manchette novels to have appeared so far in English are Fatale (available as an NYRB Classic), Three to Kill, and The Prone Gunman.

Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translations of noir fiction include Manchette’s Fatale and 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 Guy Debord, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Antonin Artaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire.