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.

Private eye Eugéne Tarpon is back to sleeping in his office, waiting for a paying job to turn up. Then he gets a call from a sometime contact in the police department. He's referring a nice old lady—a distant relative—to Tarpon; her daughter's gone missing and, the copy says, there's no finding her. There are no leads. She's gone. But the old lady's pigheaded. Do me a favor, he tells Tarpon. Humor her. Take her off our hands. Take her money, too. And, by the way, there's no need to investigate the actual business at all.

Tarpon may be down and out, but he's too much of a gentleman for that. Plus, fed an obviously fishy story, he doesn't have it in him to let well enough alone.

Once again, Tarpon is making a very big mistake.

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.