Trivia

Mac Orlan lived in Rouen and Paris as a young man, working at a variety of jobs and learning to play the accordion.

He fought in the war against Germany until wounded in 1916, after which he worked as a war correspondent.

Using his real name, Pierre Dumarchey, and various pseudonyms including: Docteur Fowler, Pierre du Bourdel, Pierre de Jusange, Sadie Blackeyes, Chevalier de X, and Sadinet, he was for several years a writer for Paris Sex-Appeal, and of pornographic novels, which frequently depicted flagellation and sado-masochism. These titles include: La Comtesse au fouet (1908), the story of a cruel dominatrix, Les Grandes Flagellées de l'histoire (1909), Lise Fessée (1910), Masochism in America (1910), Miss (1912), and Petite dactylo et autres textes de flagellation (1913). He told Pascal Pia that he used the Dumarchey name to upset an uncle of his who made his life hard.

He was also a prolific writer of chansons, many of which were recorded and popularized by French singers such as Juliette Gréco, Monique Morelli, Catherine Sauvage, Francesca Solleville, and Germaine Montero.

His novel Quai des Brumes was the source for Marcel Carné's 1938 film of the same name, starring Jean Gabin.

New English translations of his books A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer, translated by Napoleon Jeffries (2013), and Mademoiselle Bambù, translated by Chris Clarke (2017), have been published in the United States by Wakefield Press.

In the late 1920s he became an influential critic of film and photography, writing important essays about the work of Eugène Atget, Germaine Krull and others.

The French singer Germaine Montero released an extensive set of her interpretations of Mac Orlan songs on the CD Meilleur de Germaine Montero.

Pierre Mac Orlan was a French novelist and songwriter.

The physicist Freeman Dyson, in his 2008 AMS Albert Einstein Lecture, interprets MacOrlan's song "La Ville Morte" ("The Dead City") as an example of the "empty city archetype", a Jungian archetype as described by mathematician Yuri I. Manin.