Ivory Pearl

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.

Doug Headline is the son of Jean-Patrick Manchette. For over three decades, he has been active as a journalist, director, and screenwriter while also writing, translating, and publishing comics. In collaboration with the artist Max Cabanes, he has adapted in graphic-novel format three of Manchette's novels, Ivory Pearl, Fatale, and Nada, and is at work on a fourth.

Gary Indiana is a critic and novelist. His most recent books include I Can Give You Anything But Love, a memoir, and Tiny Fish That Only Want To Kiss, a collection of short fiction. His writing has appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times, Vice, the London Review of Books, and many other publications.