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Jean-Patrick Manchette (19 December 1942, Marseille – 3 June 1995, Paris) was a French crime novelist credited with reinventing and reinvigorating the genre. He wrote ten short novels in the seventies and early eighties, and is widely recognized as the foremost French crime fiction author of the 1970s - 1980s. His stories are violent, existentialist explorations of the human condition and French society. Manchette was politically to the left and his writing reflects this through his analysis of social positions and culture. His books are reminiscent of the ''nouvelle vague'' crime films of Jean-Pierre Melville, employing a similarly cool, existential style on a typically American genre (film noir for Melville and pulp novels for Manchette). Four of his novels have been translated into English. Two were published by San Francisco publisher City Lights Books (''3 To Kill'' (the French "Le petit bleu de la côte ouest" ) and ''The Prone Gunman'' (the French "La Position du tireur couché" )). Two other novels, ''Fatale'' and ''The Mad and the Bad'' (the French "O dingos, O chateaux!" ), were released by ''New York Review Books'' Classics in 2011 and 2014, respectively. In 2009, Fantagraphics Books released an English-language version of French cartoonist Jacques Tardi's adaptation of ''Le petit bleu'', under the new English title ''West Coast Blues''. Fantagraphics released a second Tardi adaptation, of "La Position du tireur couché" (under the title "Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot" ) in the summer of 2011, and has scheduled a third one, of "Ô Dingos! Ô Châteaux!" (under the title "Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell") in January 2015. Manchette himself was a fan of comics, and his praised translation of Alan Moore's ''Watchmen'' into French remains in print. A film adaptation of ''The Prone Gunman'' under the title ''The Gunman'', starring Sean Penn, was released in March 2015. ==Youth and early writings== Born December 19, 1942 in Marseille, where the war had temporarily led his parents, Jean-Patrick Manchette spent most of his early years in Malakoff, in the southern suburbs of Paris. Growing up in a relatively modest family (his father started out as a factory worker, later to become an electronics sales executive ), he proved to be an excellent pupil and from an early age showed a keen taste for writing. During his childhood and teen years, he wrote hundreds of pages of pastiches of war memoirs or science fiction novels gradually turned into attempts at "serious" fiction. A compulsive reader, passionate lover of American film and jazz music (he himself played the tenor and alto saxophone ), he also developed a lifelong interest in chess and all types of strategy games. While his parents envisioned a teaching career for him, to their great dismay he suddenly dropped out of his studies at the ENS without graduating, and decided to try and earn a living writing. He went to England to teach French for one semester in a college for the Blind at Worcester, then returned to France. A left-wing activist during the War of Algeria in the early 1960s, he was at that time very much influenced by the writings of the Situationist International. His first goal was to become a screenwriter. Trying to achieve this, in 1965 he began a series of numerous and diverse menial writing jobs: scripts for short films, various treatments, and two low-budget films for director Max Pecas (''Woman beleaguered / The Prisoner of Desire'' and ''Fear and Love''). In 1968, he first encountered success writing scripts and dialogue for eleven episodes of popular television series '. Concurrently, he wrote novelizations of several films (''Mourir d'aimer'', ''Sacco and Vanzetti''), novels derived from episodes of ''The Globetrotters'', fiction for kids, espionage novels, and even an erotic novel, all under pen names. Alone or with his wife Melissa, he also translated two dozen English-language novels, mostly novels by Robert Littell, crime fiction or books about film (memoirs of Pola Negri, biographies of Humphrey Bogart and The Marx Brothers, etc...). All these jobs, while barely earning him a living, also kept him away from the screenwriting work he was aiming for. Turning to novels then appeared to be the next step, as he figured once his novels were in print, studios might be interested in turning them into film. He thus envisioned writing his first novel as a path towards writing for film 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jean-Patrick Manchette」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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