He's France's answer to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe: Leo Malet's Nestor Burma, ace detective. Richly visualized by Jacques Tardi, Malet's mystery comes to life as a black-and-white movie on paper through the illustrations of one of the world's foremost comics artists, Jacques Tardi, whose work has been championed in the United States by Maus' Art Spiegelman. Malet was heavily influenced by Chandler, and Hammett, and Burma's appearance ushered in a whole new era in French detective fiction. Nestor lives a precarious existence in a time and a place that few have dared to touch-namely, France during and just after World War II. Nestor is the owner and sole operator of the Fiat Lux Detective Agency in Paris, in a France very much under the thumb of the Nazis and the Vichy regime during World War II. Burma has appeared in thirty-five novels, numerous short stories, four movies, two television movies and a long-running television series. Nestor Burma, in an attempt to fulfill a dying man's plea, finds himself enmeshed in a dangerous web of deceit and betrayal involving French collaborators and the terrifying, all-powerful Gestapo. It will take all his skills as a detective to stay alive-and free, for in Nazi-held France, there are fates worse than death!