Bloody Streets of Paris Book

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.