C'est la Vie: Shocking, hilarious and poignant noir

Pascal Garnier, who died in March 2010, was a talented novelist, short story writer, children's author and painter. From his home in the mountains of the Ardeche, he wrote fiction in a noir palette with a cast of characters drawn from ordinary provincial life. Though his writing is often very dark in tone, it sparkles with quirkily beautiful imagery and dry wit. Garnier's work has been likened to the great thriller writer, Georges Simenon.

'A jeu d'esprit of hard-boiled symbolism, with echoes of Raymond Chandler, T.S. Eliot and the Marx Brothers' Wall Street Journal 'Nicely off-balancing in its twists and turns' Complete Review 'Trippy, cool, empathetic, violent, and surprising. I don't know what more you could want' NB 'Moves quickly, contains memorable characters, and has just the right combination of narration and descriptions of events' Criminal Element 'For surreal noir Garnier is hard to beat' Crime Review UK'Witty and dark' Jera's Jamboree Praise for Pascal Garnier'Deliciously dark ... painfully funny' Marilyn Stasio, New York Times 'Brief, brisk, ruthlessly entertaining ... Garnier makes bleakness pleasurable' John Powers, NPR 'Wonderful ... properly noir' Ian Rankin 'Horribly funny ... appalling and bracing in equal measure' John Banville 'Garnier plunges you into a bizarre, overheated world, seething death, writing, fictions and philosophy. He's a trippy, sleazy, sly and classy read' A. L. Kennedy 'Worthy of J. G. Ballard. 4 stars' The Independent 'Combines a sense of the surreal with a ruthless wit' The Observer 'Reminiscent of Joe Orton and the more impish films of Alfred Hitchcock and Claude Chabrol' Sunday Times 'Tense, strange, disconcerting and slyly funny' Sunday Times 'A mixture of Albert Camus and J. G. Ballard' Financial Times 'Bleak, often funny and never predictable' The Observer'A master of the surreal noir thriller - Luis Bunuel meets Georges Simenon' Times Literary Supplement 'A perfectly balanced cross between a thriller and a social document' L'Express 'A guaranteed grisly thriller' ShortList 'Arch and lyrical ... a funny and outlandish story' Crime Thriller Fella 'Garnier's main theme - the banality of a bourgeois existence - is a common one, although never, in my experience, has it been dealt with so succinctly ... a clever piece of literary noir' Killing Time Crime 'Combining the style of Simenon with the visual imagination and humour of the Coen Brothers, there is much to recommend these novellas. They are small works of literary genius, and I would urge you to discover them for yourselves' Raven Crime Reads 'If you appreciate Georges Simenon's romans durs, i.e. his harder, edgier novels, Garnier is your boy ... He routinely tosses off penetrating philosophical truths like they're afterthoughts, as the French do so well. There's dark humor in these short novels, lots of apparently arbitrary brutality that's all the more chilling due to its seeming randomness, colourful characters, and some lines and passages that hit such a deep place, you just have to put the book down and reflect for a while after reading them' Criminal Element