Euro Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to European Crime Fiction, Film and TV
256
Euro Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to European Crime Fiction, Film and TV
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Overview
The invasion of foreign crime fiction, films, and TV—and not just the Scandinavian variety—has opened up incredible new options for crime fiction lovers, but the sheer volume of new European writers and films can daunting. This book provides a highly readable guide for those wanting to look further than the obvious choices as well as a perfect shopping list for what to watch or read before that trip to Paris, Rome, or Berlin. Euro Noir presents a roadmap to the territory and is the perfect travel guide to the genre. From Italy, the guide discusses such influential authors as Andrea Camilleri and Leonardo Sciascia; Mafia crime dramas Romanzo Criminale and Gomorrah; and of the gruesome Gialli crime films. From France and Belgium, it covers important writers from Maigret's creator Georges Simenon to today's Fred Vargas; cult television programs Braquo and Spiral; and films from the classic heist movie Rififi to modern greats such as Hidden, Mesrine, and Tell No One. German and Austrian greats include Jakob Arjouni and Jan Costin Wagner, and such crime films as Run Lola Run and The Lives of Others. The best crime writing and filmmaking from Spain, Portugal, Greece, Holland, and other European countries are also covered.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781843442455 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Oldcastle Books |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2014 |
| Series: | Pocket Essential series |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 913,542 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Euro Noir
The Pocket Essential Guide to European Crime Fiction, Film & TV
By Barry Forshaw
Oldcastle Books
Copyright © 2014 Barry ForshawAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84344-248-6
CHAPTER 1
ITALY
The sun beats down, and cold-hearted murder is done. The very individual (and more laidback) approach to crime fiction in Italy, most Latin of countries – with its endemic political and religious corruption – is fertile territory for crime fiction, not least for the way its deceptive languor is shot through with the ever-present influence of the Mafia.
It is notable (and perhaps regrettable) that, as yet, many of the remarkable and idiosyncratic talents of this Mediterranean branch of the crime fiction genre have not made the mark that their Scandinavian confrères have. But enthusiasm among non-Italian speaking readers is growing. The attentive reader will take on board the sometimes subtle, sometimes direct political insights and historical contexts to be found in the work of such writers as Leonardo Sciascia, Carlo Lucarelli and (of course) Andrea Camilleri. But along with the better-known names, much light may be thrown on the strategies and achievements of writers yet to break through outside Italy. Potential readers, however, should be aware that sheer narrative pleasure is the key element of most Italian crime fiction, rather than (generally speaking) the more astringent sociopolitical fare from other countries. Italy, of course, has produced one of the most ambitious historical crime novels ever written (though one that has defeated many a reader with insufficient patience), Umberto Eco's sprawling, phantasmagorical, philosophical The Name of the Rose (1980), a book graced with one of the most celebrated translations ever accorded a non-English language novel, courtesy of William Weaver.
Apart from the Italian writers listed below, mention should also be made of the contribution to the dissemination of Italian crime writing of a man known to many readers as the 'King of the Erotic Thriller'. Due to the burgeoning popularity of the latter genre, his time has certainly arrived and he is now one half of the EL James rival, 'Vina Jackson'. However, crime fiction fans are more likely to celebrate Maxim Jakubowski (born in England to Russian-British and Polish parents and raised in France) as one of the most reliable editors in the field, with a lengthy CV of distinguished entries. One in particular, Venice Noir (2012), is part of the long-running 'Noir' series issued by Akashic Books, and is a particularly cherishable entry. The company appears to be working its way through every city on the planet (how long before they get to Wigan Noir?), but Italy is solid territory. The writers represented here are an eclectic bunch, with some prestigious Italians (all ably translated) such as the idiosyncratic Matteo Righetto, along with some reliable Brits such as Roy Grace's creator, the estimable Peter James. And while we're mentioning Italian crime writers who deserve attention, the following need a namecheck: Marco Malvadi, Dacia Maraini (sorely in need of more UK translations), Giampiero Rigosi, the more literary Antonio Tabucchi and the prolific, highly adroit Marco Vichi (whose Death in Florence is essential reading).
Latin Temperaments
If French crime fiction lags slightly behind in the social relevance stakes, things are, however, changing in Italy, as that country's crime fiction is gradually coming to terms with a fractured political situation and a long series of political scandals. The doyen of Italian crime writers, Andrea Camilleri, rarely engages directly with politics or social issues. (Although, during the massively controversial Silvio Berlusconi era, he did quote Dante: 'The country has the wrong helmsman.'). While his books accept endemic corruption as part of the fabric of Italian society, they are – generally speaking – elegantly written escapist fare. Other writers, such as Carlo Lucarelli and Giancarlo De Cataldo, engage more directly with the way society works, but few tackle such issues as bloody-mindedly as recent writers like Roberto Costantini.
Andrea Camilleri: The Master
The seal of the best foreign crime writing is as much the stylish prose as it is the unfamiliar settings readers are transported to. When both ingredients are presented with the expertise that is Andrea Camilleri's hallmark, Mr Micawber's words are à propos: result, happiness. Camilleri has familiarised us with his Sicilian copper Salvo Montalbano, a laser-sharp mind, and a gourmet whose mind frequently strays to food. Most of all, we know his stamping ground: the beautiful, sleepy territory of Vigata. And the heat. In August Heat (2009), it is omnipresent and crushing.
The novel starts with a sleight of hand, cleverly misdirecting the reader. Montalbano is dragooned into a search for the brattish child of friends. The house they are staying in is thoroughly searched, but there is no place the child could have hidden. Until, that is, Montalbano discovers a hole in the ground that leads to a hidden subterranean floor – one illegally concealed to sidestep planning laws. The child is there, alive, but also in the sunless room is a trunk, containing the plastic-wrapped, naked body of a murdered girl.
All of this is masterfully handled, and will delight Camilleri admirers. But there are caveats. What, for example, of Montalbano's team of coppers? The author assumes we'll know them and offers not a jot of characterisation or description which becomes a problem for new readers. No characterisation, that is, apart from that of Montalbano's clownish assistant, Catarella, long something of a problem for English readers. How do you translate a character who uses broad Sicilian argot? Does a translator – in this instance, the admirable Stephen Sartarelli – render what Catarella says into pidgin English? Or into how pidgin Italian might sound in English? The ungainly compromises here are unsatisfactory ('poisonally', 'he's a one wherats is got a shoe store'), and prompt the thought that perhaps they should be considerably toned down in the translation process. Italian readers may chuckle at the original, but it's a trial for English readers.
But these are minor quibbles, with the customary sardonic rendering of Camilleri's epicurean inspector pleasurable as ever. And the author is always, bracingly, a provocative writer: he has Montalbano admiring (unnamed) the Swedish writers Sjöwall and Wahlöö, and their 'ferocious and justified attack on social democracy and the government'. Such spleen is in Camilleri's novel too, along with the aforementioned thrust at a 'helmsman whom [Italy] would have been better off without'.
More Montalbano
The most striking foreign crime fiction writing may be found in the very personal prose of the best writers as it is in the colourful locales we are taken to. This piquant combination (very much a Camilleri signature) blossoms in The Wings of the Sphinx (2009). Here again is Camilleri's intuitive Sicilian copper Montalbano who combines rigorous analytical skills with copiously indulged gourmet tastes. Here again is the pretty, somnolent territory of Vigàta. Montalbano is having problems with his long-distance lover, Livia, and he has other worries: he is aware of the passing of the years and the deadening effect of the violence that is such a constant presence in his job. Then a grisly discovery is made – the corpse of a young woman is found, half of her face missing. The remaining clue to who the dead woman was is a tattoo – the eponymous sphinx. The same mark is to be found on three other young women, Russian immigrants to Italy. All three are sex workers – and all three have disappeared. This is highly involving fare and The Wings of the Sphinx (translated by Stephen Sartarelli) is top-notch Camilleri.
In The Age of Doubt (2012), an encounter with a mysterious young woman leads Montalbano to the harbour where he is to discover something very strange: the crew of a yacht called the Vanna, which was due to dock in the area, has discovered a body floating in the water. The face of the dead man has been mutilated. Montalbano begins to take a very close interest in the crew of the yacht and its enigmatic owner, the attractive and volatile Livia Giovanni. The most idiomatic foreign crime fiction is a passport to the exotic settings we are transported to, and this element is delivered with the skill that is Andrea Camilleri's stock-in-trade in one of the veteran writer's most recently translated books. We are back in the company of Camilleri's canny Sicilian policeman, whose counterintuitive response to crime remains nonpareil, and his sybaritic gourmet tastes are still firmly in place.
The Track of Sand (2011) will keep admirers more than happy. Montalbano is strolling on the beach near his home when he discovers a dead horse. But when his men arrive on the scene, the horse has disappeared leaving behind only traces in the sand. Later, Rachele, an attractive horsewoman, reports the disappearance of her horse, stabled by one Lo Duca, one of the richest men in Sicily. He, too, has discovered that one of his horses has gone missing. As the above suggests, this is one of the most unusual of Camilleri's novels, and all the winning characteristics we have come to know so well in his epicurean hero are firmly in place.
The Scent of the Night (2005) and The Potter's Field (2012) are subtly different from other novels by the veteran writer. In the first, an elderly man holds a distraught secretary at gunpoint, and the doughty Inspector Montalbano finds himself involved. The secretary's employer, a high-flying financial adviser, has disappeared, taking with him several million lire placed in his hands by the citizens of Vigàta. And the case has some personal ramifications for Montalbano, involving building taking place where he doesn't want it to happen – on the site of his favourite olive tree. With the usual quirky characterisation of his epicurean gourmet copper, along with the unflinching insight into the vagaries of human behaviour that are Camilleri's stock in trade, the resulting mix provides one of the most delicious entries in a highly distinctive canon.
In The Potter's Field, Vigàta is suffering from storms, among the worse the generally sedate town has known. Montalbano is summoned when a dismembered body is found in a field of clay. The body bears traces of being the victim of an execution, and this would appear – once again – to be the work of the local Mafia. But there are several unanswered questions. Why, for example, was the body cut into 30 separate pieces? Matters are complicated for Montalbano by the strange, uncommunicative behaviour of his colleague Mimi – along with the seductive appeal of Dolores Alfano, looking for Montalbano's help in finding her missing husband. The seal of the best foreign crime writing is as much the stylish prose as it is the unfamiliar settings readers are transported to. When both ingredients are presented with the expertise that is Andrea Camilleri's hallmark, the result is sheer pleasure.
Leonardo Sciascia: The Godfather
The immensely influential Leonardo Sciascia (who was born in Racalmuto, Sicily in 1921 and died in 1989 in Palermo) is one of the most comprehensively significant of Italian writers, celebrated for his swingeing examination of political corruption and the corrosive concomitants of power. His work is shot through with intellectual rigour. Sciascia made his living teaching even when writing and only decided to write full time in 1968. His political commitment was well known: he was a Communist Party representative on Palermo city council, and followed this with a stint working for the Radical Party in the Italian Parliament. From Sciascia's early work in 1950 (Fables of the Dictatorship with its critique of fascism) onwards, political engagement was always on the writer's agenda. His first crime-related novel appeared in 1961, the brilliantly written The Day of the Owl, with its sharply drawn picture of the Mafia, consolidated in later books. His influence on the many writers who succeeded him is incalculable.
Gianrico Carofiglio: Proust and Prosecution
The elegant Gianrico Carofiglio is very much his own man. Meeting him in the plush fifth floor bar of Waterstone's, Piccadilly, when he was in London to promote his novel Temporary Perfections (2011), I was quickly impressed by his erudition (Proust, Chesterton and Steinbeck are cultural reference points namechecked within a few minutes), his fierce intelligence and knowledge of the law (prior to his highly successful crime-writing career, he was celebrated as a prosecutor in the Italian town of Bari), and his extremely proficient English. Yes, Gianrico Carofiglio is his own man – but after just a few minutes in his company it's impossible not to be reminded of another highly successful crime writer.
Carofiglio is tall, attractive and casually dressed in jeans that show just the right amount of distress. His effect on women is quickly evident, and when he talks about the fact that he is regarded by feminine admirers as something of a surrogate for his fictional protagonist, lawyer Guido Guerrieri, it's hard not to think: 'Gianrico Carofiglio is the Italian Lee Child!' And if his hero, Guido, is a more thoughtful, less two-fisted character than the brawling Jack Reacher, he is as much a favourite with female readers as Lee Child's maverick trouble-shooter. Asked about the author/character syndrome, Carofiglio smiles and stretches out his long legs, sinking back into the overstuffed armchair. 'Well, the question I am most often asked by those who read my books is: "Are you Guido?" I used to say no, I'm not; he's a character I write about. But then I realised the effect he was having on readers – particularly women – and I decided to be more ... flexible!'
Crime fiction in translation is a taste the English are rapidly acquiring, and writing as vivid and astringent as Carofiglio's should accelerate the trend. The author is a brave man: an anti-Mafia judge in Puglia who has taken on the powerful and (lethal) corruption that is endemic in Italy. His debut novel Involuntary Witness, published by plucky independent Bitter Lemon Press in 2010 and followed since by other, well-received books, begins with the discovery of a child's body in a well at a southern Italian beach resort. A Senegalese peddler is arraigned for sexual assault and murder, but Defence Counsel Guido Guerrieri realises that the truth is more complex. A tangled skein of racism and judicial corruption confronts Guerrieri. Italian crime fiction seems more ready to take on uncomfortable social issues than the home-grown product, and Carofiglio's trenchant prose makes for irresistible reading – the latest book, Temporary Perfections, is even more accomplished. (His English translators are Howard Curtis and Antony Shugaar.)
His time as a prosecutor has left Carofiglio crammed with the kind of minute legal expertise that he channels so entertainingly (if exhaustively) into his novels, but he is surprisingly dismissive of his time in this high-profile job. 'I suppose I reached something of a midlife crisis,' he says. 'I'd reached the age of 40, and thought "what am I doing?" I realised that I wasn't doing what I wanted to do with my life. Certainly, my job was demanding and fulfilling and it was satisfying to work within the parameters of the law – interrogation, for instance, is a fascinating process (Carofiglio has written popular non-fiction books about the legal profession), but ever since I read Jack London's White Fang as a boy, I wanted to write – that book was genuinely life-changing for me. At the age of 40 I decided to buckle down and actually do it – to try to write. And to my relief, readers appear to be responding to what I'm doing.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Euro Noir by Barry Forshaw. Copyright © 2014 Barry Forshaw. Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,Chapter 1 Italy,
Chapter 2 France,
Chapter 3 Germany, Austria and Switzerland,
Chapter 4 Spain and Portugal,
Chapter 5 Greece,
Chapter 6 The Netherlands,
Chapter 7 Poland,
Chapter 8 Romania,
Chapter 9 Scandicrime Revisited,
Appendix 1 Publishing Translated Crime Fiction,
Appendix 2 The Petrona Perspective,
Appendix 3 Crossing the Bridge with Sofia Helin,
Appendix 4 Jørn Lier Horst: Language – Hero – Environment,
Appendix 5 Selected Top Crime Novels by Country,
Appendix 6 Selected Top Crime Films and TV by Country,
Copyright,