Ivory Pearl

March 5, 2018
First published in France in 1996, this unfinished novel from Manchette (1942–1995) was supposed to be the start of his magnum opus, a series following famed war photographer Ivory Pearl from 1945, when she is a refugee child in postwar Berlin, through geopolitical hot spots of the next 40 years. The opening chapter in particular is as sharp and brutal as anything Manchette wrote, including his masterpiece, The Prone Gunman. The obsessive details (“a semi-automatic Sauer Model 38 chambered in .380 ACP and fitted with a silencer”) might make even Ian Fleming feel uninformed. Though the spy-versus-spy scenario circles the globe, most of the plot concerns Ivory taking a sabbatical in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra range in 1956, as Castro emerges on the revolutionary stage. There she meets the bullet-scarred Victor Maurer and a seven-year-old girl who may be the missing niece of an international arms trafficker. Then a helicopter carrying an elite hit squad arrives. The included author notes suggest how it all might have ended. Noir fans won’t want to miss this one.

March 15, 2018
In his final, unfinished novel, available for the first time in English, Manchette departs from crime fiction--but not extreme violence--to deliver a saga of high adventure.Princess of the Blood, as the book was originally titled, is largely the story of Ivory "Ivy" Pearl, a Frenchwoman of international intrigue who ran away from an orphanage during the German invasion of France and, in her mid-20s, runs into war zones as a photojournalist modeled after Robert Capa. When she announces her intention to retreat to some isolated place to take nature photographs, she is directed to the Sierra Maestra mountains of Cuba. But there's danger there, what with a revolution brewing, an influx of arms dealers, mercenaries, and hit men, and a kidnapped girl. Manchette's sentences are so stripped down ("Her heart was not hardened but her skin was thick") that they sometimes seem held in place by a vise. The book is in the grip of hip culture, with a multitude of references to bebop recordings, American crime fiction, and stylish films of the period. This was to be the first of an ambitious cycle of novels. Ten pages of notes by Manchette outlining where the novel was headed are included. It's a shame he didn't get a chance to compose those works, but thanks to New York Review Books' translations, the English-speaking world has a generous sampling of his unique fiction to enjoy.Idiosyncratic French novelist Manchette, whose 1995 death at age 52 prevented him from completing this existentialist thriller, went out in style. Short but sprawling, the novel packs a mean punch.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.