Skeletons in the Closet

Eugéne Tarpon, the private-eye protagonist from Manchette’s No Room at the Morgue, appears once more for a characteristically brisk and brutal story full of unexpected comedy and feeling.

Sex, drugs, and . . . murder. Private eye Eugène Tarpon (previously seen in Jean-Patrick Manchette’s No Room at the Morgue) returns for another punishing round against the forces of greed and malfeasance. Along the way he drags his only friends, Charlotte Malrakis and Jean-Baptiste Haymann, through some gruesome episodes of their own. In Skeletons in the Closet, Manchette aims his dark humor at corruption at the highest “spiritual” and political levels. A savage page-turner with a heart.

Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–1995) was a genre-redefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, critic, and translator. 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 subsequent works over the course of the next two decades and establishing a new genre of French detective novel. NYRB Classics publishes his Fatale, The Mad and the Bad, Ivory Pearl, Nada, The N'Gustro Affair, and No Room at the Morgue.

Alyson Waters has translated many books from the French, including A King Alone by Jean Giono, Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery, No Room at the Morgue by Jean-Patrick Manchette, and Henri Duchemin and His Shadows by Emmanuel Bove, all available from NYRB Classics. For NYRB Kids, she has translated Our Fort by Marie Dorléans and The Tiger Prince by Chen Jiang Hong.