The first time I saw it, years back, it was a pitiful copy, marred by a clumsy pan & scan treatment and washed colors that left a very bad impression.
TOUCH DETECTIVE 3 ENGLISH PATCH SERIES
The Burma series is one of the longer running private eye series, with twenty-nine books and several short stories spanning almost fifty years. In 1943 he published 120, Rue de la Gare, which introduced Nestor Burma, his most popular character, and by 1948, he had won France’s prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.
His first detective novel, Johnny Métal , appeared in 1941, under the pen name of Frank Harding. He tried his hand at poetry, and became a reporter for a number of radical papers, and a member of the notorious Surrealist Group from 1930 to 1949. Lacking much education, he became a chansonnier at La Vache Enragee in Montmartre, Paris in 1925. H e adopted the shortened version of his name, Léo, when as a teenager he started hanging out with local radicals. Like Burma, he was a reformed left-wing idealist and anarchist. One of the most influential detective writers in France, Léon Jean Malet was born in 1909 in Montpelier and lived a rather colourful life. Some of their graphic novels have even been translated into English - they’re well worth tracking down.Īnd if your French isn’t up to snuff, in the nineties, Britain’s Pan began releasing English translations of several of the books in the nineties. More recently, Moynot has continued the graphic noveld, but very much following Tardi’s style. In 1982, legendary French comics artist and huge Malet fan Jacques Tardi (alone and with fellow cartoonist Emmanuel Moynot) began adapting the Burma novels into some very well done graphic novels, and even penned some original Burma stories. The show ran for from 1991 until somewhere around 2000, which ought to indicate how well-thought of the character is in France. There have been at least three films and, in the nineties, a television series. Other supporting characters include Zavatter, an allegedly-reformed burglar, who sometimes helps out Burma Police Commissioner Faroux, who begrudgingly admits Burma’s a pretty decent detective and Faroux’s assistant, Inspector Fabre, who doesn’t trust Burma any farther than he can throw him.īurma 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.īut Nestor’s popularity and influence have gone far beyond the original novels.
The only other employee at Fiat Lux is Nestor’s long-suffering, starry-eyed secretary, Hélène, who’s got it bad for the boss. Nestor is the owner and sole operator of the Fiat Lux Detective Agency in Paris, in a France still very much under the thumb of the Nazis and the Vichy regime. Now it’s a time and a place that few have dared to touch–namely, occupied France, and the years just after. But Burma is more than just a transplanted American dick in a beret.īurma was a former POW, returned to a still-occupied Paris after a stint in a a German Stalag, and the world has–to put it mildly–changed. A former anarchist, with roots in radical politics, his life had already been precarious enough before the war, although his cynicism–and his pipe-smoking–seems to have survived intact.
Malet was heavily influenced by Chandler, Hammett, et al, and Burma’s first appearance, in 120, rue de la gare (1943), ushered in a whole new era in French detective fiction. M esdames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen, may we introduce to you France’s answer to Chandler’s Marlowe, the one and only, NESTOR BURMA- detective de choc!
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