By: Jacques Tardi Publisher: IBooks Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 192 Publication Date: December 09, 2003 Studio: IBooks
Amazon.com Review: The Bloody Streets of Paris is a classic detective story set against the Nazi occupation of Paris. Newly discharged from a WWII prisoner of war camp, Nestor Burma finds himself unraveling a convoluted mystery surrounding the death of an associate. The fast-paced, tightly plotted story is suspenseful and gripping. But the genius in The Bloody Streets of Paris is its depiction of wartime Paris. The Nazi occupation flips the Parisian life on its head. Their familiar surroundings are suddenly ominous and fraught with danger. It's with this looming presence as a backdrop that Burma attempts to solve the mystery. French illustrator Jacques Tardi adapted The Bloody Streets of Paris to graphic novel form. Born at the end of World War II, Tardi heard stories of both world wars from his grandparents. His grandparents' stories greatly marked the illustrator as a child. In an interview for a French periodical he explained, "What interests me [about war] is daily life: how do people continue from one day to next under such conditions?" Tardi's black and white illustrations brilliantly evoke the gritty urban atmosphere of forties' Paris.--Leigh Gable
Product Description:
He's France's answer to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe: Léo Malet's NESTOR BURMA, detective. Richly visualized by Jacques Tardi, Malet's mystery comes to life as a black-and-white movie on paper through the illustrations of one of the world's foremost comics artist, Jacques Tardi, whose work has been championed in the United States by Maus' Art Spiegelman.
Malet was heavily influenced by Chandler, Hammett, and the like, and Burma's appearance ushered in a whole new era in French detective fiction. Nestor lives a precarious existence in a time and a place that few have dared to touch-namely, France during and just after World War II. Nestor is the owner and sole operator of the Fiat Lux Detective Agency in Paris, in a France very much under the thumb of the Nazis and the Vichy regime.
Burma appeared in almost thirty novels, including an interesting series within a series called "les Nouveaux Mysteres de Paris," comprising fifteen novels, each one devoted to a Paris district. Nestor's popularity and influence have gone far beyond the original novels. As well as being one of the most influential detective writers in France, Léo Malet's Nestor Burma is one of to the longest-running PI series, with twenty-nine books and several short stories spanning almost fifty years.
Great Art & Atmosphere, Contrived Story ^ In 1942, French writer Leo Malet began his long-running "Nestor Burma" series of crime novels with "120, Rue de la Gare." Renowned French illustrator Jacques Tardi adapted that book (and four others which have yet to appear in English) to his own graphic style, and the result is this fairly engaging crime graphic novel set during the German occupation of France during World War II. The book opens in late 1940, with ace pipe-smoking Parisian private eye Burma in a German P.O.W. camp, interned with all the other French soldiers waiting to be processed and demobilized. Among those he encounters in camp are a shifty burglar, a doctor he once helped out, and a haunted-looking amnesiac. Just before dying in the camp infirmary, the amnesiac cries out a mysterious address and the name "Helené" in Burma's presence. Several days later, Burma and a trainload of other repatriated soldiers are idling at the train station in Lyons, en route to Paris. From the train, Burma spots his old partner Bob on the platform and calls out to him. Bob runs toward Burma, yells out the same mysterious address as the amnesiac, and is gunned down by an unknown assailant before he says any more.
Burma leaps from the moving train and immediately begins his investigation into the puzzle. Where is the address? Who is Helené? Why was Bob in Lyons? Who was the amnesiac? What was his connection to Bob? And who was the beautiful woman at the train station? Fortunately, Burma has a journalist pal in Lyons, and through a network of friends of friends, starts digging -- all against the backdrop of the German occupation. The cast of characters is classic crime stuff, rumpled newspaper hacks looking for a scoop, thin-lipped disapproving women, fat-cat lawyers, befuddled cops, a mysterious beauty. The plot is classically labyrinthine, with all kinds of twists and turns, culminating in a classic gathering of everyone in one room to unmask the killer scene. While it all reads pretty well, if one stands back from it all at the very end, the story starts to rapidly lose its sheen. As is the case with many first crime novels, once untangled, you realize it depends on far too many wild coincidences to be remotely plausible.
Tardi's detailed black and white style is well suited to the material and period. One can see the influence of Hergé, a lot of research has gone into the details which fill out the backgrounds, especially exterior architecture and the "set dressing." Especially fascinating are all the handbills, posters, and graffiti relating to the occupation that plaster the walls Burma strolls by. Like a lot of European artists, his faces tend to be a little more exaggerated and grotesque in some cases than one might wish, but this is a minor quibble. The paneling is simple and straight-forward, however the frames tend to be somewhat overwhelmed by the text. Adapted from a novel, this is a much wordier work than most graphic novels, and it would have been nice had Tardi shrunk the balloons a little and made the copy a little smaller so the art could breathe. The translators have done an excellent job with the tough-guy dialogue, and the background of the occupation (rationing, curfews, blackouts, British bombers, etc.) lend depth to what is essentially a story of greed.
Note: To date, only nine of the 30+ Nestor Burma novels have been translated into English, and those are all out of print. The French titles of the other four Malet works adapted by Tardi are: "Brouillard Au Pont De Tolbiac", "Une gueule de bois en plomb", "M'as-tu vu en cadavre?", and "Casse-pipe à la nation."
Deserves a wider audience ^ You can get a synopsis from the professional reviews. The question is will a reader of "crime fiction" paperbacks pick up this book? In my opinion, many should as it is a seldom seen mix of hard-boiled detective fiction (with a slight European texture) and exquisitively detailed graphic novel.
Nestor Burma is a detective from the Marlowe mold: he gets into fights and wins, drinks too much, smokes too much, and bullies women into confessing their wrongs. But no hard-boiled detective I have ever read in American fiction has ever shamefacedly apologized to a woman wrongly accused - with flowers!
The artwork is dark and filled with details that bring occupation-era Paris to life. The war and its battles are shown only at the edges of the plot, but every panel can remind you that it is there. This illustrates the way the French citizens tried to get on with the process of living while being occupied.
If you have read Chandler or Hammett and like watching a tough man attempting to survive a universe that does not care about him, you will like to read about Nestor Burma. And if you have never read a graphic novel before, you can certainly read this one without fear that someone will think you are reading a "comic book."
First-rate marriage of two genres ^ The time is 1940-41 and the focus of this engaging and engrossing yarn is Nestor Burma, captured and interned by the Germans -- along with most of the rest of the French army -- following the blitzkrieg and the government's capitulation. Before the war, Burma ran the Fiat Lux detective agency in Paris and his investigative skills are needed again in finding the origin and identity of an amnesiac fellow prisoner -- and also the killer of an old friend and associate murdered before his eyes at a railway station. The cast of characters includes journalists, cops, lawyers, and crooks -- both big-time and two-bit. The German occupation is always in the background but it's not really part of the story. Rather, this is a classic "noir" murder mystery, complete with a wrap-up scene where everyone involved comes together to hear the detective explain the clues and identify the murderer. This is a sort of minimalist approach to the graphic novel form: Straight story-telling in black-and-white, each bit in its own rectangular frame, emphasis on the words rather than artsy effects. And it's an excellent piece of work.
beautifully translated by jean-marc and randy lofficier ^ this masterpiece of european comics, based on the leo malet detective novel, is impeccably drawn by Jacques Tardi and beautifully translated by Jean-March and Randy Lofficier. For mature readers due to a few questionable panels of nudity and contextual violence, it takes the reader into the heart of WWII occupied France with style, tension and detail. A not-to-be-missed graphic novel mystery. --from ibooks, the publisher
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