The Mad and the Bad

Manchette...was instrumental in the development of a new generation of French crime fiction—the neo-polar—with his unpredictable, fast-paced, politically informed novels...[The Mad & the Bad] is violent, swiftly paced, & grotesquely funny. — The New Yorker

Michel Hartog, a sometime architect, is a powerful businessman & 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 & Peter escape. Thompson pursues. Bullets fly. Bodies accumulate.

The craziness is just getting started. 

Like Jean-Patrick Manchette’s celebrated Fatale, The Mad & the Bad is a clear-eyed, cold-blooded, pitch-perfect work of creative destruction.

The Mad & the Bad is the NYRB Classics Book Club selection for July 2014.

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Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–1995) was a genre-redefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, critic, & translator. Born in Marseille to a family of relatively modest means, Manchette grew up in a southwestern suburb of Paris, where he wrote from an early age. 

In 1971 he published his first novel, a collaboration with Jean-Pierre Bastid, & embarked on his literary career in earnest, producing ten subsequent works over the course of the next two decades & establishing a new genre of French novel, the néo-polar (distinguished from the traditional detective novel, or polar, by its political engagement & social radicalism).