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by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Eugéne Tarpon, the private-eye protagonist from Manchette's
Private eye Eugéne Tarpon is back to sleeping in his office, waiting for a paying job to turn up. Then he gets a call from a sometime contact in the police department. He's referring a nice old lady—a distant relative—to Tarpon; her daughter's gone missing and, the copy says, there's no finding her. There are no leads. She's gone. But the old lady's pigheaded. Do me a favor, he tells Tarpon. Humor her. Take her off our hands. Take her money, too. And, by the way, there's no need to investigate the actual business at all.
Tarpon may be down and out, but he's too much of a gentleman for that. Plus, fed an obviously fishy story, he doesn't have it in him to let well enough alone.
Once again, Tarpon is making a very big mistake.
"I'm already on record saying that I'd rather read the French noir writer — even one of his less-than-successful efforts — than most contemporary genre writers, and Skeletons in the Closet...is up there with his brutal best." —The New York Times
This information about Skeletons in the Closet (New York Review Classics) was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–1995) was a genre-redefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, critic, and translator. In 1971 he published his first novel, a collaboration with Jean-Pierre Bastid, and embarked on his literary career in earnest, producing ten subsequent works over the course of the next two decades and establishing a new genre of French detective novel. NYRB Classics publishes his Fatale, The Mad and the Bad, Ivory Pearl, Nada, The N'Gustro Affair, and No Room at the Morgue.
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