Léo Malet was a poet and mad about surrealism. He was a friend of Jacques Prévert, who got Malet a walk-on part in Carné’s cel-ebrated Port of Shadows. But it is to his fictional character Nestor Burma that Malet really owes his fame – Nestor Burma the great detective, “l’homme qui met le mystère KO” (the man who knocks the mystery out), as his motto proudly claims.Malet wrote his first Burma in the spring of 1942, but publication, under the title 120, Rue de la Gare, was delayed until the following year. In 1946, the book – which is set during the Nazi occupation of Paris and Lyons – was made into a film, and some 30 other titles were published in the years that followed.In 1986-87, Jacques Tardi produced a cartoon version of 120, Rue de la Gare, having begun by adapting Malet’s Brouillard au Pont de Tolbiac (Fog on the Tolbiac Bridge) a few years earlier.This detective saga was thus successively published by more than one publishing house. At the request of Fleuve Noir and Presses de la Cité, Tardi began illustrating the covers in 1989.En 1996, Fleuve Noir published several episodes under the title Les Aventures de Nestor Burma. Tardi illustrated them all and 120, Rue de la Gare appeared, logically enough, as volume 1. This is the cover here.