Marcel Duhamel

Biography

After its military service during which it makes a decisive meeting - the poet Jacques Prévert -, it settles in the Montparnasse district and attends a group of surrealist, of which the painter Yves Tanguy and majority of the writers of the Thirties.

In 1928, it translates a first novel, " The Emeralds sanglantes" of Raoul Whitfield. It connects various small trades like that of modiste, decorator, chief of plate to the Pathé-Nathan studios, publicity agent, editor during two years of a review of tourism ( Voyage in France ).

Following the translation of a second novel (" Small César" of William Riley Burnett), he works for the studios of Tobis Klangfilm and adapts the dialogs of more than one hundred of American films.

In parallel, he plays cinema in films like " The Business is in the sac" , " The Last milliardaire" or " The Crime of Mr. Lange".

Its meeting with the playwright Marcel Achard in 1944 is determining. This last makes him discover two black novels of Peter Cheyney. Enthusiastic, Marcel Duhamel translates them and proposes in Gallimard to publish them in a new collection. In October 1945 will be created the “Black series” and it will direct this collection until its death in 1977, thus popularizing the American black novel near several generations of French.

During the Fifties and Sixties, it creates and animates other literary collections: “Pale Series” and “Panic” (Gallimard), “Oscar” (Denoël), “High voltage” (ZED).

It undertakes at the same time an activity of translator of works of John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Wright, Erskine Caldwell, Irwin Shaw and many authors of black novels.

Adapter for the theater of several novels (" No orchises for Blandish" Miss; ; " Trouble at the hommes" , etc), Marcel Duhamel also signed an autobiography: " Do not tell your vie" (Mercure de France, 1972).

The proclamation of the " Black series "

In 1948, Marcel Duhamel written what will remain a long time “the proclamation of the " Black series ". After more than fifty years, this text remains of a rare topicality.

“That the reader not warned is wary: volumes of the " Series noire" cannot without danger being put between all the hands. The amateur of enigmas in Sherlock Holmes will not find often his account there. The systematic optimist either. Allowed immorality in general in this kind of works to only be used as driving bolt with conventional morality, is there at it very as much as the beautiful feelings, even of the amorality very short. The spirit is seldom conformist. One sees police officers more corrupted there than the criminals than they continue. The detective sympathetic nerve always does not solve the mystery. Sometimes there is no mystery. And sometimes even, not of detective of the whole. But then? … Then there remains action, anguish, violence - in all its forms and particularly more honnies - tabassage and massacre. As in good films, the states of hearts result in gestures, and the fond of delicacies readers of introspective literature will have to deliver themselves to the opposite gymnastics. There is also love - preferably bestial - disordered passion, hatred without mercy. In short, our goal is extremely simple: you to prevent from sleeping. ”

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