An Incomplete Rebirth
1989
On the first page of his journal for 1989, Manchette, who was a lifelong diarist,* places two epigraphs:
I have been Caliph now for fifty years. Treasures, honors, pleasures—I have enjoyed all of them, exhausted all of them. Monarchs, my rivals, revere, fear and envy me. Everything a man could desire has been vouchsafed to me by heaven. I have counted the number of days, over this long period of seeming felicity, when I truly felt happy; the sum comes to fourteen. On this evidence, mortals, prithee judge grandeur, the world, and life.
Abd-ar-Rahman III, Caliph of Córdoba (891–961)
That figures.
Budd Boetticher, Ride Lonesome (1959)
With Ivory Pearl, Manchette undertakes what is to be a cycle of novels recounting the geopolitical history of the world from 1956 onwards. His plan is to incorporate ideas previously explored in the various versions of Iris† and in other unfinished projects of the 1980s. The title of the cycle is to be Les Gens du mauvais temps (“People in a Bad Time,” or perhaps “People in the Wrong Time”). Manchette works on the first novel throughout the year.
1990
Manchette continues work on Ivory Pearl, now named La Princesse du sang (Princess of the Blood).
July–August. He completes the first of four translations of novels by Ross Thomas, Out on the Rim. On finishing this, he returns to La Princesse. Corresponds with Thomas.
1991
Continues working on La Princesse.
April–June. Translation of Thomas’s The Fourth Durango.
July–August. Health problems. Manchette is hospitalized, undergoes surgery for pancreatic cancer, and spends a month in a convalescent home before returning to his own home in early October in a state of severe fatigue.
By July 1991 I was up to my fourth false start on a novel perhaps to be called La Princesse du sang. I had started rewriting this novel in 1989 after seven or eight years of work in the film and television world and elsewhere. . . . But every time I had gone back to La Princesse, someone close to me had fallen gravely ill and I abandoned the book and went to work on translation, which does not require the same emotional involvement.
In that month of July it was my turn to fall ill, in the event with a case of jaundice. It soon transpired that I had a tumor at the head of the pancreas. In August, a surgeon . . . cut out the head of my pancreas and various nearby bits and pieces. I spent eight hours on the operating table and five days in intensive care. I found it rather exciting to cohabit with death for a little while.
“Notes Noires,” Polar 10 (new series), August 1993
1992
February. Manchette begins the translation of Thomas’s Twilight at Mac’s Place.
May. Fatigue prevents him from accepting an invitation to the Noir In Festival at Viareggio to receive the Raymond Chandler Award.
Summer. He spends another summer in different medical institutions. Beset by exhaustion and depression.
The noir novel in its cultural purgatory was able to maintain a realist and critical position for over a half century. Now it has escaped that purgatory, but only to fall into the supermarket of cultural co-optation and into the arms of a literature notoriously on its last legs since the 1920s.
“Notes Noires,” Polar 11 (new series), December 1993
1993
Refusing to give in to illness and fatigue, Manchette musters his forces.
He resumes his collaboration with François Guérif’s crime fiction journal Polar, contributing four articles (“Notes Noires”) to the new series of the periodical in the course of the year.
Medical follow-up. Voluntary admission to Saint-Antoine Hospital psychiatric department with a view to getting rest, but to little avail.
June–July. Feeling better, Manchette plans a visit to Cuba to undertake background research for La Princesse. Departure with his wife Mélissa on June 27. For two weeks they crisscross the island by car, even though Manchette has not driven for ten years.
Calling the noir novel a “witness to its times” exposes it to enormous competition considering all the “noir novels” we are fed by the media. . . . A noir novel may have terrorists for characters; it may have terrorism as “background” or setting. But it can hardly have terrorism as its subject: if it did, it would have to express the truth of terrorism. Now, that truth has probably been expressed already (which does not mean it absolutely cannot play a part in a novel), but it has been expressed amidst a plethora of lies by all the “transmitters” of our bloviating world. The truth, as clear thinkers have noted, has been reduced to one hypothesis among others. And the noir novel, if it makes common cause with the truth (and if it does not, it is worthless) must find itself similarly swamped. Has it therefore no other option but to sink into “literary” ostentation, just as so much State-supported crime fiction has done recently?
“Notes Noires,” Polar 12 (new series), March 1994
1994
February. Manchette begins his fourth and last Ross Thomas translation: Voodoo, Ltd.
May. Prefaces Alexandre Dumal’s novel, Je m’appelle reviens (My name is Come Back).
August. Writes the introductory chapter of a collective volume designed like the game of Exquisite Corpse and published to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Série Noire.
September–December. Despite a pulmonary infection, Manchette resumes work on La Princesse.
November. A medical follow-up reveals a spot on his left lung.
Let us scoff yet again at scribblers who are forever claiming that such and such a work is “more than a mere crime novel.” The noir novel, fatheads, has not been waiting for you to come along in order to achieve a stature to which most other schools of fiction cannot even aspire.
“Notes Noires,” Polar 15 (new series), May 1995
1995
January 2. For the first time in forty years, Manchette decides to stop smoking.
January 11. Surgery for lung cancer at Laennec Hospital, transfer to Saint-Antoine Hospital, and thence to a clinic where he undergoes chemotherapy.
March. Delivers his last “Notes Noires” to Polar. Once again he asserts the importance of the noir novel in twentieth-century literature.
April 20. Last entry in his journal: “Too ill to note anything. Reading various things. Can’t concentrate.”
June 3. Having been hospitalized once more at Saint-Antoine in May, Jean-Patrick Manchette dies in the night.
—MÉLISSA MANCHETTE and DOUG HEADLINE