Sweet news from Bitter Lemon Press

The good folks at Bitter Lemon keep making interesting tweaks and additions to their offerings. First they moved into English-language crime fiction, adding titles by D.B. Reid and Australia's Garry Disher to their fine list of translated crime.

Now, they plan a book of short stories from Italian crime writers, the company's first move into short fiction (hat tip to Crime Scraps). Crimini, with publication dates of January 2008 in the U.K. and April 2008 in the U.S., will include stories by Massimo Carlotto, Niccolo Ammaniti, Andrea Camilleri, Carlo Lucarelli, Marcello Fois and others. I like the catalogue's description of the book's nine stories as often darkly humorous.

But the best news from Bitter Lemon is the upcoming publication (February 2008, U.K. / January 2009 U.S.) of Friedrich Glauser's The Spoke. Glauser was one of the outstanding crime writers ever: low-key, compassionate, witty, deadpan. Getting his work translated into English is the best thing Bitter Lemon has done.

One question: For some reason, I'd thought that Glauser wrote six novels about Sgt. Studer, and I could have sworn that I heard this from Bitter Lemon. But the company says The Spoke is the fifth and last of the Studer books. I shall investigate!

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Friedrich Glauser
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Italian crime fiction