Convivial quayside kebab with Karim at Crimefest

Peter Guttridge (left) with crime critic/kebab eater Ali Karim.

When the pace slackens and the volume starts to die down at the Crimefest hotel bar, somebody says: "Hey, Ali! Let's go for a kebab!"

Only hours after the photo above was snapped, I joined Ali Karim and Mike Stotter for refreshment procured from a late-night kebabery and consumed on a quayside bench. By day, Bristol's quay bustles. By night, under the stars of a cool spring sky, it's a delightful place to recount the highlights of the festival's first day.

For me, these included:

1. Valerio Varesi's citation of Carlo Emilio Gadda as a forefather of Italian crime writing. I'd mentioned Giorgio Scerbanenco as one such but, since the introduction to my edition of Gadda's That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana invokes such names as Robert Musil and James Joyce, I'd figured Italians might regard Gadda as a literary rather than a crime writer. Varesi thanked me for citing Scerbanenco, but he also said: "There's another great forerunner: Carlo Emilio Gadda."  Varesi also said, in response to a question from the floor about which countries' crime fiction each of the panel's authors liked to read, that he enjoyed French crime writing. This made sense to me, as his atmospheric fiction reminds me a bit of Georges Simenon, Fred Vargas, and Pierre Magnan.
2. Meeting up with Detectives Beyond Borders favorite John Lawton,  and buttonholing guest of honor William McIlvanney at the bar and finding that this author of the Laidlaw novels, revered by authors and readers as the father of Scottish crime writing, is a fine gentleman.
3. My pub quiz team's coming within a second tie-breaker question of being the first group or person ever to best Martin Edwards at anything at Crimefest.

On to Day 2, and the arrival of the Irish crime writers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

How Swede it isn't: Is Italian crime fiction the next wave?

I gave up speculating about next big things a few years after the Beatles broke up, but it occurs to me that the next cosa grande in crime writing could be Italy.

Three of the six novels shortlisted for the CWA's International Dagger Award this year are Italian: The Dark Valley by Valerio Varesi (translated by Joseph Farrell), The Potter's Field by Andrea Camilleri (tr. Stephen Sartarelli), and I Will Have Vengeance by Maurizio de Giovanni (tr. Anne Milano Appel), the last of which is also up for the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger. Furthermore, the good folks at Hersilia Press, who specialize in Italian crime fiction and who publish I Will Have Vengeance, are also bringing out an English translation of A Private Venus, a 1966 novel by Giorgio Scerbanenco, the father of Italian noir. That's good news.

The De Giovanni, titled Il senso del dolore in its original version and set in Italy's Fascist period, will make an interesting comparison with some of my favorite historical crime fiction: Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca trilogy of Carte Blanche, That Damned Season and Via delle Oche. (Read the first chapter of I Will Have Vengeance at the publisher's Web site.)

Hersilia, by the way, was the wife of Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome. Hersilia are also long-spinnered bark spiders. What this says about ancient Roman women, I don't know.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Weather or not in crime stories

Valerio Varesi doesn't know enough to come in out of the fictional rain, and the opening pages of his novel River of Shadows are none the worse for it.

Those pages, in which a drenching rainstorm weighs heavily on the thoughts of a group of boatmen, are a good answer to anyone who insists a crime story should not begin with weather. Use weather to create suspense, let drumming rain or the wind-blown clatter of signs in a deserted square work their way under the characters' skins — or the reader's — and you'll pull the reader right in. Simenon did it in The Yellow Dog, and Varesi does it here.


(Photo by your humble blogkeeper)

(Varesi's The Dark Valley has been shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association International Dagger for translated crime fiction. The short list was announced at Crimefest 2012. Here are the shortlists for the six awards announced at Crimefest.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012