The Book Jean-Patrick Manchette Didn’t Live to Finish

Ivory Pearl is the lion’s share of a book that, sadly, Jean-Patrick Manchette—polymath, chess whiz, jazz superenthusiast, comic-book lover, literary genius—didn’t live to finish. Like Boris Vian, who also died young, Manchette was impossibly overgifted, able to do anything supremely well with playful grace and intelligence. Like Vian, he was an artist whose work was matched by a beautiful personality, an artist one falls in love with. 

After a seven-year break from novel writing, freshly inspired by the espionage thrillers of Ross Thomas and John le Carré, Manchette saw a way forward, envisioning stories spread across a wider terrain than the French settings of his other works. Starting with Ivory Pearl, the series would follow its characters far into the second half of the twentieth century, much the way the three finished volumes of Jean-Paul Sartre’s planned tetralogy, The Roads to Freedom, track diverse Parisians from prewar café society through the “phony war,” the real war, and the German occupation.

The final chapters of Ivory Pearl exist only as notes left by the author, edited by his son. Even in this incomplete state, however, the novel brilliantly manifests the simultaneities and expansive purview Manchette intended.

Samuel Farakhan was not sleeping. In thrall to the dubious lucidity of insomnia, he was sitting in his private study smoking a Player’s Navy Cut, both hands trembling slightly in the white light of a