Léo Malet (7 March 1909 – 3 March 1996) was a French crime novelist and surrealist.
Leo Malet was born in Montpellier. He had little formal education and began work as a cabaret singer at "La Vache Enragee" in Montmartre, Paris in 1925.
In the 1930s, he was closely aligned with the Surrealists, and was close friends with André Breton, René Magritte and Yves Tanguy, amongst others. During this time, he published several volumes of poetry.
He died in Châtillon, a little town just south of Paris where he had lived for most of his life, four days before his 87th birthday.
Though he dabbled in many genres, Malet is most famous for Nestor Burma, the anti-hero of Les Nouveaux Mystères de Paris. Burma, a cynical private detective, is an astute speaker of argot (French slang), an ex-Anarchist, a serial monogamist and an inveterate pipe smoker. Of the 33 novels detailing his adventures, eighteen each take place in a sole arrondissement of Paris, in a sub-series of his exploits that Ma...
