Meny
Portrait image of Léo Malet Photo: Louis MONIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images (1987)

Sample of authors

Malet, Léo

French author born as Léon Malet in Montpellier. Having lost his parents when he was four years old, he was raised by his paternal grandparents. He left school at an early age and started to work, among other things, in a bank and in a factory. In his spare time he sold anarchist magazines. When he was sixteen he ran off to Paris where he tried to make a living singing at a cabaret in Montmartre ...

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Literary figures

Penny (Pennington) Wise

Gender: Male

The young and rather self-assured Pennington ‘Penny’ Wise is an artist, as well as a famous – at any rate in the books by Carolyn Wells – ‘psychic’ detective. It means that he solves cases that seem to be inexplicable, and often have supposedly ‘supernatural’ elements. Which do, of course, in the end transpire to have completely natural explanations. His assistant is the teenage film actress Zizi.

Further reading