Ivory Pearl

Set in Cuba's Sierra Maestra in the 1950s, in the days leading up to the Revolution--Manchette's unfinished masterpiece with a fearless female protagonist.

Four of the ten titles in Jean-Patrick Manchette's celebrated 1970s cycle of hard-boiled novels, which the author originally dubbed néo-polars, or "neo-crime novels," have now appeared in English translation. Manchette is beginning to have a significant following among English-language readers, as witness chatter in cyberspace, favorable reviews, increasing sales, and the fact that the latest entrant, The Mad and the Bad (New York Review Books), won the 2014 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Donald Nicholson-Smith.

Ivory Pearl, aka Princesse du sang, published posthumously -and unfinished - in 1996, is considered by many French critics to be Manchette's masterpiece. In the early 1980s Manchette abandoned his attempt to "press the roman noir into the service of the social revolution" and turned his pen to other things. By the end of that decade, however, he resolved to start anew, though now working on a broader, "geopolitical" canvas. Inspiration came now less from Hammett's Red Harvest than from John Le Carré and, especially, from the works of Ross Thomas that Manchette had been translating.

Sadly, Manchette's early death from cancer in 1995 put an end to this grand project. What remains, however, is Ivory Pearl, set mainly in Cuba's Sierra Maestra in the 1950s. The book will not disappoint those who admire Manchette's mastery of suspense and penchant for dauntless feminine protagonists.

Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) was a genre-redefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, critic, and translator. Throughout the 1960s Manchette supported himself with various jobs writing television scripts, screenplays, young-adult books, and film novelizations. In 1971 he published his first novel, a collaboration with Jean-Pierre Bastid, and went on to produce ten subsequent works over the course of the next two decades and establishing a new genre of French novel, the néo-polar (distinguished from traditional detective novel, or polar, by its political engagement and social radicalism). NYRB Classics also publishes Manchette's Fatale and The Mad and the Bad. 

Donald Nicholson-Smith was born in Manchester, England and is a longtime resident of New York City. For NYRB Classics he has translated Manchette's Fatale and The Mad and the Bad and Jean-Paul Clebert's Paris Vagabond, and for NYR Comics he has translated Yvan Alagbé's Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures and Nicole Claveloux's The Green Hand and Other Stories.