Why Jean-Patrick Manchette Abandoned the Crime Novel

—The following was written as an introduction to the novel, Ivory Pearl

This striking posthumous work—La Princesse du sang (Princess of the Blood) in its original French version—was intended by my father to kick off a major new cycle of novels. But death decided to intervene, and this ambitious project was never completed. Reading this unfinished book proves a fascinating experience, a glimpse into what might have been, and a remarkable confirmation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s unique talent.

Manchette began work on Ivory Pearl in the early days of 1989. For the writer, the novel meant a return to the literary spotlight. He had achieved fame throughout Europe in the 1970s thanks to a groundbreaking series of noir novels and their popular movie adaptations. But Manchette had published no new novel for the better part of a decade—not since the masterful La Position du tireur couché (The Prone Gunman), first serialized in 1980 and 1981 in a monthly magazine put out by the publisher of the weekly Charlie Hebdo and finally released in book form in Gallimard’s celebrated Série Noire the following year.

For Manchette, The Prone Gunman was the final step in his attempt to reach “a total behaviorist style,” a manner of writing stripped down to the bare essentials and devoid of any superfluous effects, in which the simple statement of fact replaced any psychological comment or explanation. A passionate admirer of Dashiell Hammett and the bare-bones approach of the American hard-boiled school, Manchette had by now become a master of that approach. It thus seemed impossible to him to keep walking down that same path without repeating himself. His disillusioned overall vision of the world and culture around him matched the pessimistic outlook of the French Situationists. He had seen an entire chapter in history come to a close as, at the end of the 1970s, the curtain rang down on “a period during which the return of the 1968 revolution still seemed a possibility.” It was thus hardly surprising that his assessment of the European crime novel, once but no more a means of stirring subversive ideas, was in no way indulgent or nostalgic. As he said in a 1991 interview with Antoine de Gaudemar for the daily Libération:

Most of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have either been taken over or have run out of steam. The crime novel has followed suit. It is now no more than a minor cultural commodity perfectly integrated into the order of things and governed by authors who share none of my concerns.

How, in that case, with such a harsh view of the current state of the literary genre he had helped revitalize for more than a decade, could Manchette possibly resume his career as a novelist without betraying his own convictions? If one were to assign him a dominant character trait, it would have to be the moral rectitude exemplified by the intransigence he showed for himself as much as for others. He therefore felt obligated to search for a new form, and a new field, for fear of losing his soul.

And yet he was loath to abandon noir fiction entirely, for he loved the genre above all and considered it, in his own words, “the great moral literature of our times”:

I am very much attached to the style of the American roman noir, but I fear the literary tendencies of the polar [French crime novel] like the plague. . . . Literary pretension has always disgusted me.

This paradoxical, uncomfortable situation led him to take on a great number of menial writing jobs, mostly for film and television, the income from which granted him some much needed time to think things over and search for a new way forward.

During the 1980s, while working on scores of commissioned screenplays and the like, Manchette also took on some translation work for his personal writing pleasure. He had long considered that translating could be noble work and help a writer hone his skills. While applying these skills to authors he admired—Donald E. Westlake among others—he was also publishing brilliant, insightful articles on noir fiction, proving to be one of the best analysts and theoreticians of the genre. A large number of these columns, ranging over twenty years, were collected after his death in Chroniques. This exciting collection of essays offers an erudite, meticulous, and often amusing tableau of the entire history of American crime fiction, complete with profiles of authors ranging from such founding fathers as W. R. Burnett, Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy, Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, or Jim Thompson, to less famous practitioners like Paul Cain, P. J. Wolfson, Donald Henderson Clarke, Elliott Chaze, and many more.

Meanwhile, during his absence from the literary scene, Manchette’s name became a sort of magic wand. The French press was continually on the lookout for his slightest interventions, his most trivial printed words. A positive side effect was that he was able to hasten the discovery of some major writers he had praised, translated, or introduced, among them James Ellroy, then in the early stages of his career, or the British comics author Alan Moore.

All the while, Manchette was accumulating outlines for novels, drafts of novels, beginnings of novels. The amount of written pages he produced between 1982 and 1988 was quite simply enormous. As he said in the Libération interview:

I spent my time writing and telling myself that what I was writing was no good. I threw away all my drafts. I found them, shall we say, redundant. I junked a tremendous quantity of stuff. I was trying to carry on as though the closure that The Prone Gunman represented was not a closure at all, or at least as though I had not realized it was one. It was not ideas I was short of, but sooner or later those ideas all ended up boring me silly. And then, at long last, I really started writing again.

Midway through 1988, Manchette made a radical break from commissioned work. He ceased writing for film or TV almost entirely. From then on he devoted himself exclusively to writing his new novel. The only exception to this rule—other than his occasional crime-fiction columns—would be translating the novels of Ross Thomas.

Thomas and Manchette met in 1988 in Gijón, Spain, at the Semana Negra crime-fiction festival organized by fellow writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II. Thomas had a longtime acquaintance with international political circles and secret services; his books presented a sardonic view of a world governed by multiple antagonistic covert forces. This vision appealed strongly to Manchette, who had years earlier savored several books by Thomas translated in the Série Noire. The meeting was fortunate and they became friends at once. Manchette offered to find a new French publisher for Thomas’s yet untranslated novels and to handle the translations himself. The two writers corresponded regularly until Manchette’s death in 1995. By a sad twist of fate, Thomas also died that same year.

Thomas’s approach to the spy novel certainly had its influence on Manchette’s conception of the cycle he called People in the Wrong Time, of which Ivory Pearl was to be the first installment. John le Carré’s Smiley versus Karla trilogy, an intricate work from another author much respected by Manchette, also helped guide him into this new territory. The use of returning characters given primary or secondary roles in various novels, the multi-country settings, the deployment of a large number of unwittingly manipulated pawns—all these figured in Manchette’s projected cycle. Helped along in his own thinking by his exchanges of views with Thomas, he had come to see the new direction his work would take.

The new cycle was to be Manchette’s most ambitious undertaking. Its background would no longer be limited to France, nor merely to the 1970s or ’80s. The work would fuse noir fiction, spy thriller, and political history. Manchette offered a broad outline of his goals in the Libération interview in January 1991. At the time, he had been working on the novel for two years:

Basically, I backtracked, not only to my writing years but also to all these years gone by. I went back as far as 1956, a historic year: Budapest, the Algerian War. I was just a high-school student at the time, but I well remember all the newspaper headlines. My bold project is therefore to pick up on history in those years and to continue on through the sixties, May 1968, the seventies, etc. If I had to give it a general theme, it would be something along the lines of “How the hell did it all come to this?”

Ivory Pearl, the first volume in the series, would be a novel beyond genre barriers, a neo-noir adventure of historical scope written in a precise, honed-down style. It would begin to set forth Manchette’s vision of the world in the aftermath of World War II. He decided to set the main action in Cuba at the time of the Castros’ return aboard the Granma, but also simultaneously in France, Hungary, Algeria, Egypt, Ceylon. . .In short, pretty much across the globe—a way of showing how world events were all connected in this postwar era. This would be a first look at the “wrong time” that the twentieth century was again becoming in its last years, and at those who were caught up in it: the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. He strove for faultless results: surgically described action scenes, complex characters, historical settings depicted with exactitude and elegance, and a remarkably detached overall view. The task was quite a challenge and Manchette, ever the perfectionist, again produced several drafts. After each of the first two, both fascinating in their own right, he subjected his work to minute analysis and wrote highly detailed notes. The third version of Ivory Pearl was to be the definitive one.

In 1989, the year he began writing his novel, Manchette was diagnosed with cancer. He would wrestle with the disease incessantly for the next six years, writing whenever his condition allowed it. In 1991, already considerably weakened, he gathered enough strength to visit Cuba with his wife, Mélissa, for research. In 1993 he founded an iconoclastic, informal movement called Banana, whose main activity was slipping banana peels under the feet of policemen trying to break up demonstrations. Manchette garnered several absurd photographs of bewildered or infuriated cops, while managing to create minor chaos among the forces of counterrevolution. He was fifty-one. Two years later he was dead.

In 1996, a few months after my father died, a French publisher asked me whether I would like to take over and complete the novel he had left unfinished. I was puzzled by the offer, and I declined. In truth, I asked myself no questions at all nor did I hesitate; my refusal was purely instinctive. In the weeks following, two other writers (who shall remain nameless) asked me to allow them to finish the book. That really seemed inconceivable to me. But it got me to thinking, and soon led me to the conclusion that I must somehow rectify the injustice I had witnessed: a powerfully driven man stopped in his tracks as he was writing his book and planning its sequels.

For my father the tale of Ivory Pearl was a grand sally into high adventure, spy thrillers, historical and political fiction—a whole new set of genres that he planned to mine during the course of the extraordinary saga he had in mind. A rereading of modern history from the postwar years to his present day, from the time of his adolescence and the birth of his political consciousness to the time of disillusion and menacing chaos that surrounds us still. Writing this novel, with its high stakes, often acted as a rampart against illness during my father’s hard final years.

My own relationship to Ivory Pearl’s world was also quite close. Born a few years after the date of the novel’s action, I had grown up in a Cold War era in which the United States engaged in an ongoing power struggle with a Soviet empire that was still a quarter century away from crumbling. The novel’s backdrop was like a taste of my early childhood days. Fidel Castro, like Muhammad Ali, the Beatles, or Neil Armstrong, was part of every boy’s world in the 1960s. I had also grown up immersed in those same Hollywood movies my dad had loved so much—action, adventure, and war movies, and westerns—and they had helped shape my own vision and interests in later life. From the start, therefore, I felt great enthusiasm for Ivory Pearl’s story, this first tale bearing the promise of many others. Ivory was an exceptional character, whose adventures my father hoped would make for a perfect novel and the beginning of his literary rebirth—what he once called, in a letter to his publisher, “my second career”—thanks to a new form he had finally chosen after several years. She was well worth fighting for.

The first step to making sure my dad’s work would survive was getting this unfinished novel to readers, for it would have been a shame for the book to remain unread. I plunged into his notes to try and put together an introduction to the manuscript and the planned series, along with a short outline of the untold part of Ivory Pearl’s tale. I had not wished to finish the book in his stead, and now I simply wanted to give some clues to the way he saw the story unfolding. Building upon his notes and drafts, I managed to produce the brief plot summary that now appears at the end of the novel. In the process of sorting out all this material, I got even more involved with the novel and its characters than I had been during the years in which my father was creating them. Later on, while still leaving the original text untouched, I reworked the story again, adding more detail to it, rounding it out, adapting it—first as a screenplay (which has yet to be filmed) and then as the graphic novel La Princesse du sang with illustrations by Max Cabanes. This all took years off my own life as a writer and filmmaker—years during which I rarely managed to stay away for very long from the rebellious Ivory Pearl: always, I seemed compelled to return to her.

Over the more than twenty years since my father died, I have felt ever closer to him and to his work. I have done my best to keep his novels available so that his life’s work does not disappear like that, sadly, of so many authors. I am still at it today, trying to bring about new editions and new adaptations of the novels, editing his articles and interviews, his unpublished writings, his correspondence, and his massive personal journals (well over five thousand pages!). To me, this has also been a way to make his absence felt less, for every time I plunge into his works I engage with him again, almost as if our conversations, so brutally interrupted in 1995, were continuing beyond death.

So naturally I am not unmoved to see my father’s work today translated into even more languages than in his lifetime, and often by such high-class publishers as New York Review Books. Manchette has reached many new readers—from the United States to Vietnam, from Greece to Spain, from China to Japan. And well-disposed readers they are, impressed by the quirkiness of his characters and the flawlessness of his writing; sensitive also to the political message that is ever present, albeit never in the foreground, in these tales of human beings subject, as we all are, to the hard knocks of History.

Could this renewed interest in Manchette and his novels be a modest posthumous payback against these “wrong times” that never seem to reach an end? Or is it just a sign that, beneath the ashes of an earlier day’s dashed hopes, the spirit of revolt from 1968 still smolders?

That, only time will tell. In any case, it is now your turn to read the tale of Ivory Pearl and to think about everything that might have been. I hope you enjoy the ride.

—Doug Headline
Paris, July 2017

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Copyright © Doug Headline; courtesy of NYRB Classics