A little more then a year ago Duane Swierczynski uttered a prayer on Twitter.
“Dear God: Please have someone translate more Jean-Patrick Manchette novels.”
Well God listened because 2011 looks to be a good year for Jean-Patrick Manchette fans. We’ve got two releases to look forward to.
Get all the information after the jump.
The first is another graphic novel from Fantagraphics and Jacques Tardi called Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot and comes out in August. It is an adaptation of The Prone Gunman.
The second release is from NYRB Classics and is called Fatale and comes out in April. Here is the synopsis:
Whether you call her a coldhearted grifter or the soul of modern capitalism, for which nothing on heaven or earth has any value except its value in cash, there’s no question that Aimée is a killer and a more than professional one. Now she’s set her eyes on a backwater burg-where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous) newcomer to town, she means to sniff out old grudges and engineer new opportunities, deftly playing different people and different interests against each other the better to, as always, make a killing. But then something snaps: the master manipulator falls prey to a pure and wayward passion.
Aimée has become the avenging angel of her own nihilism, exacting the destruction of a whole society of destroyers. An unholy original, J.P. Manchette transformed the modern detective novel into a weapon of gleeful satire and anarchic fun. In Fatale he mixes equal measures of farce, mayhem, and madness to prepare a rare literary cocktail that packs a devastating punch.
Fantagraphics brings an interesting bit of information that links these two releases.
Fatale was actually almost the first Tardi/Manchette collaboration, as Tardi began an adaptation of it way back in the mid-1970s and then abandoned it in favor of drawing an original Manchette story titled Griffu instead. An English language version of Griffu was published in Pictopia back in the 1990s, and a few pages of the aborted Fatale adaptation can be seen in various Tardi collections..
