No Room at the Morgue

by Jean-Patrick Manchette, Alyson Waters (Translator), Howard A. Rodman (Afterword)

Overview

Inspired by the works of Dashiell Hammett, No Room at the Morgue is Jean-Patrick Manchette's unparalleled take on the private eye novel — fierce, politically inflected, and finely rendered by the haunting, pitch-black prose for which the author is famed.

No Room at the Morgue came out after Jean-Patrick Manchette had transformed French crime fiction with such brilliantly plotted, politically charged, unrelentingly violent tales as Nada and The Mad and the Bad. Here, inspired by his love of Dashiell Hammett, Manchette introduces Eugene Tarpon, private eye, a sometime cop who has set up shop after being kicked off the force for accidentally killing a political demonstrator. Months have passed, and Tarpon desultorily tries to keep in shape while drinking all the time. No one has shown up at the door of his office in the midst of the market district of Les Halles. Then the bell rings and a beautiful woman bursts in, her hands dripping blood. It’s Memphis Charles, her roommate’s throat has been cut, and Memphis can’t go to the police because they’ll only suspect her. Can Tarpon help? 

Well, somehow he can’t help trying. Soon bodies mount, and the craziness only grows.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681374185
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	08/11/2020
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	236,206
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

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 went on to produce ten subsequent works over the course of the next two decades and establishing a new genre of French novel, the néo-polar (distinguished from traditional detective novel, or polar, by its political engagement and social radicalism). NYRB Classics also publishes Manchette's Fatale, The Mad and the Bad, Nada, and Ivory Pearl.

Alyson Waters has translated several works from the French by Albert Cossery, Louis Aragon, René Belletto, and many others and has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund grant, and residency grants from the Centre National du Livre and Villet Gillet in Lyon. She teaches literary translation in the French department of Yale University and is the managing editor of Yale French Studies. She lives in Brooklyn.

Howard Rodman is a screenwriter, novelist, and professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. His most recent novel, The Great Eastern, was published in 2019. He lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

06/01/2020

Business is slow for Paris PI Eugène Tarpon, the narrator of this clever crime novel from Manchette (1942–1995) first published in 1973. “I sleep a lot. Or rather, I’m half awake a lot,” he admits. Tarpon also drinks a lot. Then late one night, Memphis Charles, a small-time actor, rings the bell of his tiny, five-flight walkup apartment. She has found her roommate, Griselda Zapata, with a slit throat, but doesn’t want to go to the police because she’s afraid she’ll be arrested for the murder. When Tarpon refuses to assist, Memphis knocks him out with his phone. The hard up Tarpon later accepts a large check from Griselda’s brother to find the killer. The private eye eventually reconnects with Memphis, and lies to the police about her whereabouts, as he follows leads deep into the porn industry. Manchette plays this story for ironic humor, which might distress the many fans who know him for the symphonic sessions of assassination and gunplay in such masterpieces as The Prone Gunman and The Mad and the Bad. But even a lesser Manchette remains essential reading. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

[A] clever crime novel . . . Manchette plays this story for ironic humor . . . Manchette remains essential reading.” —Publishers Weekly

“If Marx, Freud, and Jim Thompson collaborated on a noir, this might be the result.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2020-05-18
An ex-cop–turned–private eye gets involved in a murder and finds the woman who brought him into the case may be the killer.

Eugène Tarpon, the hero—if such a thing is possible in the nihilist atmosphere of this book—quit the police force after accidentally killing a protester. His attempt to make a go of it as a private eye has brought him to the brink of ruin, and he's about to retreat from Paris to his rural hometown when a mysterious woman (in noir, is there any other kind?) asks him to investigate the murder of her roommate. When he turns up at the scene, the cops are already there, the woman has disappeared, and the detective finds himself the object of police interest. Manchette, who wrote this book in the 1970s, is widely credited with revitalizing French noir. The novel is driven more by plot than attitude, and its nihilism doesn't preclude the possibility that people will act decently. At times, as when one person after another—potential clients and would-be tormentors—keeps showing up on the hero's doormat when all he wants is to nap and enjoy a tin of cassoulet, the book takes on the escalating complications of a screwball farce. An extended kidnap sequence, in which the hero finds himself stuck between thugs and the bumblings of a group of radical leftists, is brutal and funny at the same time. The plot sags a bit and the windup depends too much on pat psychologizing, but neither does too much damage to the fun.

If Marx, Freud, and Jim Thompson collaborated on a noir, this might be the result.

Kirkus Reviews