Peter Rozovsky has been reading Léo Malet recently. He's written about it on his excellent 'Detectives Beyond Borders' blog (essential reading for any fan of crime fiction) here and here. It reminded me of when I was devouring the Nestor Burma stories a few years ago and prompted me to dig out the article I wrote for the second issue of my 'Don't Forget to Dance' fanzine back in August 2008. You can download a PDF of that entire fanzine here. But here's what I wrote about Malet…

I first heard of Léo Malet through my discovery of Jacques Tardi, in the 2003 ibooks publication of an English translation of The Bloody Streets Of Paris (a comics version of the 120 Rue De La Gare novel). It was a revelation. I had heard about Tardi from rooting around in the comics world – the foreword to the book was by Art Spiegelman, and you know you should never ignore anything recommended by such a great. There was also the stylistic connection back to Herge; that ligne claire thing going on. Marvellous stuff.  

I’m glad I picked up The Bloody Streets Of Paris when I did, for this English translation seems to be somewhat scarce now, fetching large sums in the market place. It’s a shame no-one has kept it in print, for it is a superb piece of work. Now I wrote in the last issue of this ‘zine about the appeal of the Powers comic books, and the threads of Noir fiction that informed those. Well The Bloody Streets Of Paris is way up there too, thanks to the brilliant Noir writing of Leo Malet and his classic character Nestor Burma.

It’s been said before that Nestor Burma is like a Parisian answer to Philip Marlowe, and I confess to hearing Bogart’s Marlowe in my inner ear each time I read one of Malet’s books. There is a terrific edge of Chandler and Hammett in Malet’s prose. The same clipped and precise phrasing. The sharp characters. The fast cars. The faster women. The cigarettes, the whisky and the revolvers thrust in pockets. The cheap lives. It’s all there.

I know that some dislike reading anything in translation. They consider the voice to be tainted, stretched and scarred. It’s a fair point. There are some terrible translations out there, after all. But for me the English versions of Malet’s books stand scrutiny; read as though they were translated by someone with a finger on the pulse of the best Noir vernacular. I expect that they are even better in French, where I am sure that Malet’s grasp of the argot of the times must come across terrifically well. But even in translation the dialogue is terrific. Sharp. Fast. Hard. Like Pelecanos or Spillane. Derek Raymond agreed too. His short appreciation at the start of a 1991 English edition of ‘Fog On The Tolbiac Bridge’ is spot on and ends by putting Malet in the same boat as Chandler and Goodis. Such fine company. And anyone who discounts the advice of someone like Raymond is surely off the rails.

The thing is, tracking down those English translations can be a tough job. Pan published a series of titles from the thirty-three book series of Nestor Burma novels back in the early nineties, but of those only a few seem to appear in the marketplace with any regularity, and often with extreme price fluctuation. I have managed to track down eight titles, each with a gloriously evocative black and white photo of a lost Paris on the cover, as often as not taken by Robert Doisneau. Of course everyone knows Doisneau’s infamous Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville photograph. It has become a staple of student bedrooms, and rightly so for it is a delightful image. I first saw it on the cover of the ‘Plain Sailing’ 7” by Tracey Thorn. I don’t remember the image being so ubiquitous then, but that might have just been my age.

I like how people made such a fuss when Doisneau admitted, just a year before his death in 1994, that he had in fact posed that photograph. As if it really mattered. That obsession with ‘real’ and ‘authenticity’ in popular culture is so absurd. Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor’s ‘Faking It’ is an excellent read on that topic if you are interested.

And Doisneau’s Paris is Malet’s Paris. A Paris of deep dark shadows. Of fog and smoke and sunlight through the colonnades of the Rue De Rivoli. It’s an intriguing era as well, for the Nestor Burma stories span time from the depths of WWII through to the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. It’s a time of change, of conflict, of ideologies clashing. Malet captures it all, with Burma leaping from case to case, always a step ahead of the cops, pipe in one hand, revolver in the other and with a fine line in wry quips on his lips.

I have no idea how many more English translations of Malet’s books are out there. I’d like to think that the full eighteen ‘New Mysteries of Paris’ series is available (with each set solely in a different arrondissement), but I’m not holding out much hope of finding them if they are. Maybe I’ll just need to swot up on my French and pluck out the books in their original language. Well, we all need challenges, don’t we?