Micmac moche au Boul’ Mich’
Presentation copy inscribed by the author to Germaine Beaumont: “à Germaine Beaumont, cette nouvelle aventure de Nestor, avec mes respects, Léo Malet.”
The novel, set in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, is the thirteenth of the Nouveaux Mystères de Paris, a cycle of fifteen crime novels published by Léo Malet between 1954 and 1959. It features his signature detective, Nestor Burma, created in 1943 in 120, rue de la Gare. Each novel is set in a different arrondissement of Paris: “The idea came to me on the Pont de Bir-Hakeim. Looking at that view of Paris, I thought it was extraordinary that no one had ever really made a film about Paris, apart from Louis Feuillade. I had the vague idea of crime novels very different from Fantômas, each set in a different quarter or arrondissement, and there would be several of them.” His friend Maurice Renault, the publisher of many postwar popular and crime novels, then suggested a title, referring to Eugène Sue’s serial Les Mystères de Paris.
The project was never completed, for health reasons: while writing the sixteenth title of the Nouveaux Mystères de Paris, which was to be set in the 11th arrondissement and titled “La Méprise de la Bastille,” Malet began to feel symptoms of severe fatigue, which forced him to rest. He never returned to the series, as he explains in his autobiography, La Vache enragée (p. 221 ff.). Five arrondissements of Paris were therefore never treated: the 7th, 11th, 18th, 19th and 20th.
A rare edition, here of fine provenance. Influenced by the work of Colette and Virginia Woolf, Germaine Beaumont was the first winner of the Prix Renaudot. She later presided over the Prix Femina, where she notably championed André Dhôtel’s Le Pays où l’on n’arrive jamais. Fluent in English, she translated major works, including Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary. A close friend of Malet’s, she took a keen interest in the world of crime fiction, writing literary criticism for Mystère magazine between 1966 and 1977, in which “she advocated for the crime novel to move beyond its marginal status and become a novel in its own right.” As Colette put it, she wrote “crime novels without policemen.”