Biography of Léo Malet
1925
1988
Biography of Léo Malet
19251988
Léo
(Léon) Malet was born March 7, 1909 in Montpellier to Gaston and
Louise (Refreger) Malet, and orphaned by the age of 4. He was taken
in by his grandfather, a tunnel worker (described later by an older Malet
as "le prolétaire complet"), who instilled in his young grandson
a love for reading, especially the novels of Dumas and Zevaco.
Léo
attended the Ecole communale Auguste-Comte, and the Ecole primaire supérieure
Michelet, but had no other formal education. He passed time by working
for a fabric merchant, at a bank, selling anarchist newspapers from Paris
on Sunday (Le Libertaire and L'Insurgé), as well as
writing poems and songs, and hanging out with local anarchists.
In 1925, at the age of sixteen, he moved to Paris, where within two months
he became a cabaret singer at "La vache enragée" at Montmartre.
He frequented anarchist circles and continued to contribute to their various
publications, but was shipped back to Montpellier after being stopped for
vagrancy one too many times. He held more odd jobs as office worker, ghost
writer, cinema extra, manager of a fashion magazine, and newspaper seller.
In 1929, he returned to Paris with a bit of money saved, and founded the
"Cabaret du poète pendu" with Paulette Doucet, whom he would later
marry. One day at the bookstore of José Corti he bought a copy of
"La révolution surréaliste" that caught his eye. After sending
poems to André Breton, Malet was invited to meetings of the surrealist
group, though he couldn’t attend every day because he was working as a
manoeuvre.
From
1931 to 1940, he belonged to the group and was a close friend of Breton,
René Magritte, Salvador Dali, and Yves Tanguy. During that time,
he produced collections of poetry, including Ne pas voir plus loin que
le bout de son sexe (1936), J'arbre comme un cadavre (1937),
and Hurle à la vie (1940). Malet enjoyed the surrealist practice
of automatic writing, but did not follow the group into exile when World
War II broke out, choosing instead to stay in Paris with Paulette.
In
1940, Malet and Paulette Doucet, with Jacques Prévert as their witness,
were married. Soon thereafter Malet was arrested for signing a surrealist
document that was perceived by the French government as subversive. He
went to jail outside Paris for a few days, but when the Germans invaded,
he was released and chose to walk back to Paris rather than pay for a train.
But as luck would have it, the Germans captured him, thinking he might
be a military deserter, and Malet was sent to a P.O.W. camp between Bremen
and Hamburg. While there, he had an idea for a story about a murder in
the stalag. When the Germans freed him for health reasons, Malet returned
to Paris.
At
the "Café de Flore," Louis Chevance – the script-writer for
Clouzot's film "Le Corbeau" – encouraged Malet and other unemployed writers
to submit a roman policier for "Minuit," his collection of American-style
detective fiction by French authors under pseudonym. Since foreign books
could not come into occupied France, Chevance reasoned, a lot of money
could be made by producing mystery fiction "made in France". Here began
Malet’s career in the "polar," with a character named Johnny Metal
(an anagram of Malet), under the pseudonym Frank Harding. Among his other
pseudonyms were Jean de Selneuves, Lionel Doucet, Omar Refreger, and Léo
Latimer before he began to use his patronym.
Encouraged
by the success of Johnny Metal among his friends, as well as by his friend
Henri Filipachi of Livres de Poche, Malet decided he would continue to
write detective novels, but would set them in France, among familiar elements.
He was not the first French author ever to pen a roman noir, but
he was the first to make his character French, and have him solve a mystery
in France. In 1943, he created the detective "Dynamite" Nestor Burma of
the Fiat Lux detective agency, and the story in his head, "L'homme qui
mourut au stalag" evolved into the first Burma mystery, 120, rue de
la Gare.
From
1943-49, Malet wrote seven Nestor Burma mysteries before giving the detective
a vacation. Burma returned in 1954 when Malet had the idea of a series,
called Les Nouveaux Mystères de Paris, where each mystery
is set in a different arrondissement of Paris. But he interrupted
his series in 1959, with 15 out of 20 arrondissements completed, and never
finished it, neglecting, among others, the 7th, containing the quintessential
symbol of Paris, the Tour Eiffel, though he had already chosen the title
300 mètres d’agonie. He had also imagined titles for two other "abandoned"
arrondissements: Mépris de la Bastille for the 11th, and
Les
neiges de Montmartre for the 18th, though for the 19th and 20th arrondissements,
there are no documented titles.
Ten
years later in 1969, the Editions Losfeld released in one volume the
Trilogies
Noires, a collection of three novels including the 1948
La vie est
degueulasse.
In
the 1970s, Malet's oeuvre was rediscovered, reedited, and reevaluated at
a time when he himself was writing less and less. His theory was that as
May 1968 activists were throwing pavés in the Latin Quarter,
they found used editions of his work at the bouquinistes along the
Seine. He went into a depressive seclusion with his ailing wife, (frustrated
by her illness, she suicided in 1981 by throwing herself out a window),
in their HLM in the suburb Châtillon-sous-Bagneux, claiming to friends
that he no longer read. When approached, he would give interviews, most
notably an inflammatory interview in 1985 at the age of 76 to Libération
where he proclaimed that "les arabes me font chier." But despite his racist
leanings, his writing was still embraced by both the right and the left.
In
addition to being considered "le père du roman noir français",
Malet received tangible awards during his lifetime. Malet was a "Chevalier
des Arts et des Lettres." In 1948 he won the first "Grand prix de littérature
policière" to be awarded, in 1958 the "Grand prix de l'humour noir"
for Les nouveaux mystères de Paris, in 1979 the "bouchon
de cristal" at the Festival du Roman Policier in Reims, and in 1984 the
"Prix Paul Féval de littérature populaire de la société
des gens de lettres."
Malet
died March 3, 1996, shortly before his 87th birthday, expressed best on
Gallimard’s website for the Série Noire: "Le père du roman
noir français meurt. . . dans son lit!" He is survived by
one son, Jacques-Lionel.
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last updated: 09 May 2003