Léo Malet (1909–1996)

Léo Malet, considered the inventor of the French noir novel, was born in Montpellier, France. He lost both his parents and his baby brother to tuberculosis when he was a tiny child and was raised by his maternal grandparents. He had little formal education but began to read the newspaper Le Libertaire at age 14 and joined a Libertarian political group. In 1925, he ran away to Paris, where he began working as a singer at the cabaret "La Vache enragee" in the Montmartre district. He eked out a living with various day jobs such as laborer, cinema usher, and newspaper vendor. He frequented anarchist circles and occasionally wrote pieces for anarchist publications such as L'Insurgé. In 1931, he became close friends with André Breton and part of a circle of Surrealists that included René Magritte and Yves Tanguy. During this time, he published his first two volumes of poetry, Ne pas voir plus loin que le bout de son sexe (1936) and J'Arbre comme cadavre (1937). In 1940, he married his companion Paulette Doucet, who wrote novels under several pen names and helped to support him. At the outbreak of World War II, Malet was arrested for his anarchist associations by the French police and sent to a German POW camp until May 1941. Back in Occupied Paris, he turned his hand to writing fiction. Though he produced dozens of works in many genres, including historical romances, swashbucklers, and American-style crime novels, Malet became most famous for novels featuring his private detective Nestor Burma. Burma, introduced in 120, rue de la Gare (1943), was a hard-drinking, pipe-smoking, astute speaker of French argot (slang), an ex-anarchist, and serial monogamist. There were 33 novels detailing Burma's adventures and five short stories, bringing the total to 38. In 1948, Malet was the first winner of the Grand prix de littérature policière (Grand Prize for Detective Literature) for Le Cinquième Procédé. He also wrote a "Black Trilogy" of novels with semi-autobiographical elements set in the Paris underworld: La Vie est degueulasse (1948), Le Soleil n'est pas pour nous (1949), and Sueur aux tripes (1969). He published two autobiographies, La Vache enragée (1988) and Journal secret (1997). Comic book artist Jacques Tardi adapted some of Malet's Nestor Burma books. Several of the novels also were adapted into French films and a television series.