The star of the French avant-garde, the famous surrealist writer Leo Malet was a friend of J. Brel and S. Ginzburg, J. Brassens and M. Careme and many other major writers and poets. He intensely searched for new ways to develop literature, willingly caused literary scandals, but for all that he was fanatically devoted to the detective genre. His grandiose series of detective novels, “New Mysteries of Paris,” gained worldwide popularity, not least thanks to the charming image of its main character, private detective Nestor Burm, so far familiar to the Russian public only from television films.