The French Connection

Part of the incredibly exciting newly packaged Bloomsbury Film Classics series The French Connection was a worldwide bestseller Made into a hugely successful film starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider

An account of the breaking of an international drug-smuggling ring that took place from New York to Marseilles and involved over 300 policemen.'Popeye here. I am being blocked while he takes off in the other car. This is a deliberate act of obstruction! If anybody reads me - HIT that son of a bitch!' The French Connection is the heart-stopping account of an extraordinary true story. One night two New York narcotics detectives, 'Popeye' Egan and 'Cloudy' Grosso, are at the Copacabana Club when they come across a boisterous party. The host is a young pockmarked man named Patsy Fuca, and he behaves like a head gangster. When he pays his bill from a huge wad of money the detectives instinctively decide to tail him, but they are baffled to discover that Patsy is the owner of a lowly newsstand. It seems so odd that Popeye and Cloudy start to investigate, unaware that they are embarking on an eighteen-month odyssey of intrigue and conspiracy that will take them from plush tree-lined suburbs and dark Brooklyn tenements to Paris, Marseilles and Palermo, and that they will break the world's largest heroin network.