New translations of Latin American crime fiction ...

. . . into French.

The Ile noire blog recently published notice of a new series of Latin American crime novels translated into French. The imprint, L’Atinoir, has enlisted the Mexican crime novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II as a literary adviser, and the comment on Ile noire discusses offerings in the series by two more Mexican writers: Eduardo Monteverde and Juan Hernández Luna.

I don't know Monteverde or Hernández Luna, but I did a quick search for English translations of their work on the Web site of a large American book retailer. Nothing turned up. This surprised me at least mildly; one might have expected an American publisher to be at least as interested as a French publisher in work coming out of Mexico. I've written here and elsewhere about the scarcity of translated crime fiction in English. This latest example hits close to home because the writers involved are from so close to home, and readers far away will get to read them before I do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007