Giorgio Scerbanenco, the father of Italian noir — in English

How highly does Italian crime fiction regard Giorgio Scerbanenco? The Scerbanenco Prize honors the year’s best Italian crime novel. Andrea Camilleri’s Track of Sand has Salvo Montalbano reading a novel by Scerbanenco. And here’s what the Camilleri Fan Club thinks: “Scerbanenco is considered the master, the father, of Italian noir. A great Master, with a capital M.”

So the release of a Scerbanenco novel in English is a not just an event, but exceedingly rare and welcome. A Private Venus (Venera Privata), the 1966 novel that introduced the defrocked physician Duca Lamberti, is just the second of the series to be translated into English and the first in more than forty years.

What can readers expect? An introduction says that in the two decades after World War II, Scerbanenco was more prolific than Georges Simenon, and the mention of Simenon strikes a chord. The novel’s first ninety or so pages read like a Maigret novel might if the narration examined Maigret’s psyche as thoroughly as it did that of Maigret’s quary – or if David Goodis wrote a police procedural. And that’s good.

That psychological dissection is more to the fore so far than are the vivid evocations of Milan that those who read Scerbanenco in Italian often cite. The opening of Chapter Four, though, gives a tantalizing hint: “Even in Milan, the sun rises every now and then.” And a cover blurb from Carlo Lucarelli says that Scerbanenco wrote “Some of the hardest and darkest pages ever written in a novel.”

A thousand thanks to Hersilia Press for publishing the book, translated fluently into English by Detectives Beyond Borders friend Howard Curtis. I hope the house, which looks to be making much fine Italian crime writing available to readers of English, has plans for more Scerbanenco.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A deadpan novel by the father of Italian noir

The deadpan description in the opening chapters of Giorgio Scerbanenco's Duca and the Milan Murders (1966) reminded me of Jean-Patrick Manchette. That French author, I once wrote, restored crime writing's ability to shock "with tales of what power can do to those it finds convenient to crush."

So I was pleased to read in the Wikipedia article about Scerbanenco that "his style was notable for the realistic way in which [it] conveyed and evoked the helplessness and despair of weak people being cruelly victimized."

One interesting note: While Manchette was a man of the political left, the Ukrainian-born Scerbanenco's "virulent and over-the-top anti-communism ... stemmed from the trauma of losing his father during the Russian revolution," according to the same article. Before New Rightniks claim him as one of their own, though, they should note that

"While denouncing the evils of the rampant consumeristic and greedy way of life taking hold from the 60s onward Scerbanenco always has a warm word for the peaceful, quiet, hard-working Milanese"

A French translation of Duca and the Milan Murders won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for international crime fiction in 1968 (The novel's Italian title, Traditori di tutti, translates as Betrayers of All.) Scerbanenco is considered the father of Italian noir, and Italy's top crime fiction prize is named for him.

None of Scerbanenco's work is in print in English, as far as I know. If they would consider reprints, this book would make a fine addition to Europa Editions or Serpent's Tail's lists alongside such authors as Carlo Lucarelli, Jean-Claude Izzo, Gene Kerrigan and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

Here's a bit about the author and the book. And here's a short excerpt:

"Dr. Duca Lamberti?"

The voice, too, was offensive in its exemplary politeness, its exemplary diction. It was a voice that would have done credit to a teacher of elocution. Duca detested perfection of this sort.

"Yes, I am Duca Lamberti." He stood there blocking the doorway. He did not invite the caller in. The way he dressed seemed to Duca odious. Admittedly, it was spring, but this young man was already going about in a cardigan, no jacket, just this light grey cardigan with dark grey suede cuffs, and—in case anybody should imagine that he could not afford a jacket—he was carrying a pair of light gray driving-gloves, not the cheap kind with no backs, but real gloves, good gloves, with leather backs and intricately crocheted palms. It was impossible to avoid noticing these details. The gloves were very much on show, as though to make it quite plain that their owner possessed a car worthy of such a handsome pair of gloves.

"May I come in?" He was glowing with cordiality, insincere cordiality, insincerely spontaneous.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

More DBB visits ALA (If I'd stopped by the Tor/Forge booth, I could have called this post Tor and Peace)

Melville House's display at the American Library Association's 2014 Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia included Giorgio Scerbanenco's Traitors to All (published in Britain under the title Betrayal), a welcome reminder that Scerbanenco, the Father of Italian Noir, will finally be easily available in the U.S. for the first time in more that forty years. The novel appears later this year, as will Scerbanenco's A Private Venus, the appearance of whose U.K. edition had to be the event of of the international crime fiction year in 2012.

Scerbanenco may be Melville House's greatest gift to America since it reprinted Derek Raymond's Factory novels.

***

Scerbanenco may be Melville House's greatest gift to America until it publishes U.S. editions of David Peace's The Damned United, Red or Dead, and GB84 later this year. The publisher offered a 30-page excerpt of Red or Dead at its ALA booth, and the first few pages make me want to read more.  The novel is the story of a soccer manager's revolutionary salvaging of the then down-on-its-lick Liverpool F.C., but it reads like James Ellroy.

Old meets new in a cool chair
at the ALA 2014 Midwinter
Meeting. Photo  by your
humble blogkeeper.

The relentless prose suggests Ellroy, whose American Tabloid, Blood's A Rover, and The Cold Six Thousand I've read in the past month. Peace's novel, like Ellroy's trilogy, is based on history, though of a man, a city, and a soccer team, rather than of a tumultuous era in a nation's history. I expect I'll find myself comparing how the two authors make fictional sense out of reality.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Giorgio Scerbanenco, dark maestro of Italian noir

I can't quite figure out whom Giorgio Scerbanenco reminds me of most. He can be as dark as Leonardo Sciascia, as deadpan realistic as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, as probing in his observation of people as Simenon, as humane as Camilleri, as noir as Manchette, as hope-against-hopeful as David Goodis, but with a dark, dark humor all his own.

In short, the first-ever English translation of his 1966 novel A Private Venus (Venere Privata) has to be the year's biggest event yet for readers of translated crime fiction, and I hope its status as a new book in English makes it eligible for the big crime-fiction awards in the U.S. and U.K. next year.

Here's a passage that sums up the novel's intriguing mix of involvement, alienation, social observation and wry, dark self-awareness:

"Everything was going wrong, the only thing that worked was the air conditioning in those two rooms in the Hotel Cavour, cool without being damp and without smelling odd; everything was going badly wrong in a way that the confident, efficient Milanese who passed, sweating, along the Via Fatebenefratelli or through the Piazza Cavour couldn't begin to imagine, even though they read stories like this every day in the Corriere. For them, these stories belonged to a fourth dimension, devised by an Einstein of crime, who was even more incomprehensible than the Einstein of physics. What was real was going to the tobacconist to buy filter cigarettes, so that they didn't feel so bad about smoking ... "

***

Not much is available about Scerbanenco in English.  This edition of A Private Venus, from Hersilia Press, includes a short autobiography called "I, Vladimir Scerbanenko." This outline of Italian crime fiction includes a few remarks. If you read Italian, Wikipedia offers a detailed summary of the novel. The Italian Mysteries Website offers a brief discussion of Duca and the Milan Murders, a 1970 translation of Traditori di tutti, second of Scerbanenco's four novels about the defrocked Milan physician Duca Lamberti. (A Private Venus is the first.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Scerbanenco is just as good the second time

Giorgio Scerbanenco's 1966 novel A Private Venus is just as good between American covers as it is between British ones, and the best news on the Melville House edition may be the three words above the title: "The Milan Quartet."

A Private Venus was the first of Scerbanenco's Duca Lamerti novels. Melville House will publish Traitors to All later this year, with the books known in Italian as I ragazzi del massacro ("The Boys of the Massacre") and I milanesi ammazzano al sabato ("The Milanese Kill on Saturday") to follow.

The first four chapters of A Private Venus are as breathtaking and moving an opening as any in crime fiction. Here's part of what I wrote when I first read the novel, and to this list I might add the deadpan observation of Italian neo-realism and the compassion of William McIlvanney:

"I can't quite figure out whom Giorgio Scerbanenco reminds me of most. He can be as dark as Leonardo Sciascia, as deadpan realistic as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, as probing in his observation of people as Simenon, as humane as Camilleri, as noir as Manchette, as hope-against-hopeful as David Goodis, but with a dark, dark humor all his own."

Among its other high points, the book is rendered into English by Howard Curtis, one of the finest translators of crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Noir is a state of mind: Giorgio Scerbanenco's A Private Venus

Here are some reflections inspired by my second reading of Giorgio Scerbanenco's 1966 novel A Private Venus, available in the UK from Hersilia Press and in the U.S. from Melville House:

1) The novel is thoroughly noir long before it portrays any violence or criminal acts. This may remind some readers of David Goodis.
2) Its protagonist, Duca Lamberti, is a doctor who has been struck from the register for an act of euthanasia. That sounds like Goodis' ex-singer or piano player protagonists, but unlike them, Lamberti has not hit the skids. He has a sister, a niece, a powerful friend on Milan's police force, and a place to live. Noir is not synonymous with squalor. It's a state of mind, not an economic category.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Pulp in Italy: An interview with author/editor/publisher Matteo Strukul, Part I

Matteo Strukul's Edizioni BD publishes Italian translations of comics, graphic novels, fiction, and non-fiction by authors including Dennis Lehane, Alan Moore, Joe R. Lansdale, Moebius, Michael Chabon, Warren Ellis, Stan Lee, Kazuo Koike, and Jacques Tardi. The Revolver imprint, of which he is line editor, brings hard-hitting authors such as Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Russel D. McLean, and Victor Gischler to Italian readers, with more to come from the likes of Charlie Huston and Christa Faust. He lives in Padua (Padova) in northern Italy's Veneto region and, when not publishing and editing, he writes. His first novel, La Ballata Di Mila, was shortlisted for Italy's Scerbanenco Prize. In the first of a two-part interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Matteo Strukul talks about pulp fiction, Italian hard-boiled authors, comics, and his own discovery as an author by Massimo Carlotto. And, proving himself true kin to Detectives Beyond Borders, he has kind words about some of this blog's favorite Irish crime writers.

(Read Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Matto Strukul.)

==========================

Detectives Beyond Borders: Talk about the Revolver imprint, about the authors you chose, and why you chose them.

Matteo Strukul: First of all, Peter, thank you for the opportunity that you have given to me. It's great to answer your fantastic questions. I’m honored. Now, about Revolver… Revolver is an imprint focused on pulp crime fiction. We love to collect fast-paced novels. Every story has to be a real roller-coaster, a furious, well-plotted patchwork of wit and wise guys, ultra-violence and thrills, and unpredictable, lunatic characters. For these reasons we chose authors like Victor Gischler, Allan Guthrie, Tim Willocks, Christa Faust, Ray Banks. Personally, I love all these authors who are completely crazy and original but all of them have an intriguing, fascinating, irreverent approach to the genre. We want to have authors who have courage enough to break rules and to have faith in their stories and characters, doesn’t matter how crazy and strongly cruel those stories are. 

DBB: Your online biography says you were discovered by Massimo Carlotto. How did this discovery happen?

MS: Well, I was at the international Book Fair in Turin (Il salone del libro) in 2010 and, of course, Massimo Carlotto was also there. I remember that I went to the E/O publisher’s stand and said to him that I have a novel for him. Well, it was incredible when he said that he want to read it, because, man, I was and am a real fanatic of his work. At that time I was press officer with an independent and well-reputed publisher: Meridiano Zero.  I organized press campaigns for authors like David Peace, James Lee Burke, Derek Raymond. So, of course this fact doesn’t mean that I was an author but means, without any doubt, that I had a strong background. For this reason, I mean, he was curious.  I wrote for “Il Mattino di Padova,” my hometown newspaper, so he knew who I was, because Massimo is from Padova, too. So I was very lucky, in fact. Anyway, after some months, Colomba Rossi, who was responsible, together with Massimo, for a new imprint at Edizioni E/O, called Sabot/Age, sent to me an e-mail. I remember she said that my manuscript was fantastic and the character of Mila was amazing. She said also that Massimo Carlotto was really impressed and so, after that, they told me that they want to have me on board as author for the new imprint. It was amazing! 

DBB: Italy has produced some excellent, dark crime writers, such as Leonardo Sciascia and Giorgio Scerbanenco. Besides Massimo Carlotto and Carlo Lucarelli (with the De Luca novels), who are the best modern-day Italian noir, pulp, and hard-boiled writers? And what does the Anglo-American tradition give Italian readers that they will not find in Italian crime writing? Who are your favorite writers, artists, and filmmakers from that tradition?

MS: Modern-day Italian noir, pulp, and hard-boiled writers are Giancarlo De Cataldo, author of Romanzo Criminale and many other novels. A bigger-than-life and epic criminal saga, a cruel, merciless, bloody and magnificent tale about Banda della Magliana: a gang of thugs and mobsters that during the end of the seventies created a criminal empire in Rome and Italy. The novel tells the story of the relationship between criminals and corrupted politicians in Italy at that time, with gangs fighting for the control of drug traffic, prostitution and gambling in the different quarters of Rome. Another wonderful Italian novelist that I love is Maurizio De Giovanni, author of the Commissario Ricciardi series set in Naples in the early ‘30s, a fantastic police-procedural series.

DBB: Your own first novel, La Ballata Di Mila, reminds me of Quentin Tarantino’s movie Kill Bill, which was based on a comic book. You also publish a novel by Victor Gischler, whose work sometimes reads like a comic book without the pictures. How do comics influence the fiction you write and publish?

MS: Comic books are a big inspiration for my work. More than this, recently I have written Red Dread, an arc, drawn by international artist Alessandro Vitti (Marvel), with Mila as the main character. The arc was awarded the “Premio Leone di Narnia 2012” as best comic-book arc of the year. But anyway, I love authors like Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore, Victor Gischler, as I said they are a big influence, in particular I think that Mila has a big debt to Ennis' The Punisher. When you read comics, sequences and cruel feelings like violence, anger, hatred, are literally graphic. I love to study the rhythm, the action, the storytelling. Comic-books and movies are a big inspiration for my work. For instance, Punisher stories like “Mother Russia” or “Barracuda,” by Garth Ennis, or “Welcome to the Bayou,” by Victor Gischler, are stylish visions of hell. You could taste (thanks to the amazing work of guys like artists Goran Parlov or Leandro Hernandez) reasons and motivations, souls and blood, and at the end of the story what you really think is that authors like Garth and Victor are able to go right to the point. No mercy on you, as reader, no fuckin’ cheesy lines.

DBB: A number of the authors published by Revolver write slam-bang, action-packed novels: Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Victor Gischler, and Christa Faust, for example. But you also publish Brian McGilloway, a quieter and more reflective writer than some of your other authors. How does McGilloway fit in with the publishing philosophy of Revolver?

MS: You know sometimes, we have to breathe. As you said, we love to publish action-packed novels, but at the same time we would like to offer different kind of crime fiction, different tunes and tastes, and Irish noir, for instance, is a wonderful new creature that, as publisher, we would like to show to the Italian readers. I hope to publish as soon as I can guys like Adrian McKinty or Stuart Neville but sometimes you cannot publish everything you want.

*

Practise your Italian at Revolver's Web site and at Matteo Strukul's own site. Read about Italy's best current crime writers, crime in northeastern Italy, and a new Italian literary movement and crime fiction festival, coming soon in Part II of Detectives Beyond Borders' interview with Matteo Strukul.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

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

California dreaming

I'm going to California (for Bouchercon 2010); Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Salvo Montalbano is doing the dreaming, in The Track of Sand, twelfth of the Montalbano mysteries to be translated into English.

Dream scenes in movies are generally embarrassments; in books they're merely obvious. But Camilleri, who often opens his novels with Montalbano waking in the morning, shows here that he knows how to write a dream. Montalbano's dreams here feel like dreams. It helps that the crime sets the story in motion is full of material ripe for dreams: a horse, a beach, sand (as in the stuff you get bogged down running in...slower...slower...sinking deeper).

So the dream can have something to do with the mystery Montalbano is trying to solve without being clunkingly obvious about it.

***

Longtime readers of this charming series know that Camilleri likes to have Montalbano reading a mystery as he tries to relax. This time Montalbano thinks about Giorgio Scerbanenco; Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the creators of Martin Beck; and that newcomer Henning Mankell. Here's my favorite example:

"He got into bed and started reading one of the Swedish books he had bought. Its protagonist was a colleague of his, Inspector Martin Beck, whose manner of investigation he found very appealing. When he had finished the novel and turned out the light, it was four o'clock in the morning."

Readers for whom the running gag of Montalbano's inability to finish reading a Simenon novel in The Smell of the Night will find that especially noteworthy. I find it touching, and it's hard to imagine a warmer author-to-author tribute.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

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

An impeccably edited crime novel—I hope!

Sandrone Dazieri's In a Heartbeat is a wild ride of a novel about a successful advertising executive deprived by a severe electrical shock of fourteen years of memories.

This takes him back to his youthful past as a small-time cocaine dealer, and naturally he can't remember how he got all this money, a fine house and sports car, and a beautiful girlfriend—or why someone wants him dead. This is a thriller, a kind of time-travel book, a story about the sometimes humorous confrontation between selves, a bit of a satire of adverting.

Professional ethics prevent me from reviewing the book formally, but I hope that it reads well, that it has few or no typographical errors, and that its punctuation is impeccable.

***

In a Heartbeat is published by Hersilia Press, specialists in English translations of Italian crime fiction. Hersilia earlier published Giorgio Scerbanenco's A Private Venus, the event of the year in translated crime writing.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

In a Heartbeat

Sandrone Dazieri's In a Heartbeat (E' stato un attimo in its original Italian), brought to you by the publishers of Giorgio Scerbanenco's Private Venus, is one of the harder to classify crime novels you're likely to read.

Its protagonist, a young, ruthless, highly successful advertising executive named Santo, suffers a traumatic injury that robs him of fourteen years of memory. That takes him back to his time as a young, low-level drug dealer who wouldn't know the Internet if it stood up and bit him on the culo.

The clashes between Santo's past life and his suddenly unfamiliar present offers rich opportunity for drama, comedy, satire, pointed observation on the ways of business, and an ending that's—  But you'll have to read the book.

Professional ethics bar me from posting a review, but I hope its prose is just so and its punctuation perfect.

*

Read a chapter from In a Heartbeat at the Hersilia Press website.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Keeping one's hair in Dublin, plus books I got at Crimefest

Left: Sculpture,
Archaeological Museum of
 Morbihan, Vannes, Brittany. 
Above: View from the rear
 of my guesthouse, Gardiner
Street Lower, Dublin. All photos
 by your humble blogkeeper.

I opened two packages of books yesterday that I'd shipped home from Crimefest, and I must be a nice guy because I sent myself some good stuff. Among the highlights:

1. Betrayal, by Giorgio Scerbanenco. This is a new translation of a novel by the master of Italian noir. Its previous English translation was released in the 1960s as Duca and the Milan Murders.
2. The Killing Way, by Anthony Hays. A mystery set in Arthurian Britain might not ordinarily be my cup of tea, but this looks low on sorcery and faux-Celtic wiftiness, and high on low-down, dirty political intrigue.
3. The Saint and Mr Teal, by Leslie Charteris, included in my book bag, talked up by panelist Zoë Sharp, and published in a handsome new trade paperback edition. Includes an entertaining tribute to P.G. Wodehouse in one character's name.

Because everyone else is doing it?

When the crew announced itself for my Aer Lingus flight from JFK to Dublin, I first produced my pistol, and I then produced my rapier. Then I realized that Farrell was not, in fact, the captain of the plane but merely a crew member, so I stowed my musical weapons under the seat in front of me and restored my seat back and tray table to their full upright and locked positions.

Muiredach's High Cross
(detail), Monasterboice,
County Louth, Ireland

Speaking of tunes one just might hear in Temple Bar of a Saturday or any other evening, I love the song, but, unless you're Luke Kelly reincarnated, could we vary the repertoire a bit, lads?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013


Neolithic
passage grave,
Loughcrew, County
Meath, Ireland

Something new to me, if not to you.

The Bastulli Mystery Library offers the potential for interesting browsing and the chance to build up your to-read list. Its indexes crime books by author and category and also includes interviews and lists of awards.

I like the site because it introduced me to two Italian writers whose work I had not known: Santo Piazzese and Giorgio Scerbanenco, "one of the fathers of the Italian mystery."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Italian crime fiction

Eight crime writers in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My article on "Eight crime writers worth tracking down" appears in Saturday's Philadelphia Inquirer. This one was close to my heart, a chance to big-up some of my favorite crime writers and their publishers, to put their names before a wider public, and to help out eight authors who suffer the handicap, for a crime writer, of not being from Sweden or Norway.

Readers of Detectives Beyond Borders know them already, but if you're joining us for the first time, the Big Eight are, in alphabetical order:

Declan Burke. Allan Guthrie. Vicki Hendricks. John McFetridge. Adrian McKinty. Scott Phillips. Giorgio Scerbanenco. Charlie Stella.

I recommend all eight as the perfect stocking stuffer. Now, get reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Crime and crime writing in Italy: Matteo Strukul interview, Part II

In Part II of an interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Italian publisher, author, and editor Matteo Strukul talks about the criminal landscape of northeastern Italy, the literary movement he helped to found, the the crime fiction festival that bears that movements name.

(Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Matteo Strukul.) 

====================== 

Detectives Beyond Borders: In addition to being an author and publisher, you call yourself the founder of a literary movement. Talk about Sugarpulp, its goals, and how it got its name. Who are its other authors, artists, and illustrators? What is uniquely Italian about Sugarpulp?

Matteo Strukul: Sugarpulp talks about territory. Like James Lee Burke’s Louisiana or Joe R. Lansdale’s Texas, for people like me or the Sugarpulp authors (Matteo Righetto, Giacomo Brunoro, Andrea Andreetta, Carlo Callegari, Thomas Tono, Carlo Vanin, Simone Marzini, among others) the northeast of Italy is a kind of state of mind, you know what I mean? 

Swamps, sugar-beet fields, plateaus, but also triads and Chinese mafia or Russian Organisatsyia, political corruption and the slow rhythm of the country. We have many points in common with Texas or Louisiana. There’s a kind of savage cruelty here, a sort of ignorance that raised an entire generation of new-rich tycoons who obtained fortune and fame breaking rules and laws. So a place like the northeast of Italy is one of the best for crime-fiction settings. Of course, Veneto is also wonderful towns full of arts and culture; you know, Venice, Padua, Verona, and one of the most beautiful place in Italy (with Cortina d’Ampezzo and the Italian Alps or the Po Delta, the Valpolicella Valley or the Prosecco Area among others), but at the same time you could find a kind of “American western” approach that really could surprise everyone.

DBB: Sugarpulp is also the name of a crime fiction festival in Padua. What are the plans for the festival in 2013?

MS: Well, we are planning to realize our most ambitious edition. We are working to bring the cream of crime-fiction novelists to Padova this year. Hopefully Don Winslow will accept our offer; we are trying to convince him to come to Padova. Then, we will have Maurizio De Giovanni and Massimo Carlotto, and we would like to have also Giancarlo De Cataldo and Tim Willocks, among others. So, stay tuned ‘cause this year will be the big deal: Sugarpulp or Bust! Ah ah!

DBB:  Northern Italy is interesting politically, a (former) base of support for the Communist Party, for example, and also the home of the Lega Nord. How does the reality of Northeastern Italy find expression in your writing and in the Sugarpulp movement in general?

MS: Mmmm … not very Communist in fact. I think more Lega Nord-oriented. Even if in my hometown, Padua, we have a fantastic mayor, Flavio Zanonato, who belongs for instance to the Left Party, the PD (Partito Democratico) and he is a wonderful person and professional and we are very grateful to him because is one of the most enthusiast supporter of the Sugarpulp Festival and that’s great, really! Anyway, I think that this year everything will change with Beppe Grillo, founder of Movimento 5 Stelle (Five-Star Movement). I think that people are really tired of politicians who promise everything and give you nothing except for taxes.

DBB: Chinese gangsters play a big role in The Ballad of Mila, working with Italians but sometimes contemptuous of them, and trying in their own way to adjust to Italian life. They are more integrated into Italian life, even in a negative way, than, for example, Africans in novels by Andrea Camilleri or Gianrico Carofiglio. Why did you choose Chinese gangs as a subject?

MS: Because they conquered the Northeast of Italy. They destroyed the economy of the region, they worked, and work, for nothing like slaves, and the Chinese Mafia is a real problem here in Padua. They bought all the cafés and bars to recover massive amounts of dirty money incoming from drug dealing, and they are slave-drivers who enslave their people coming from China and forced them to work 20 hours a day in the clandestine textile industry with no respect for persons and for EU rules. 

DBB: Sugarpulp not the only Italian crime fiction closely associated with a city or a region. There are Giorgio Scerbanenco and Milan, Andrea Camilleri and Sicily, Carlo Emilio Gadda and Rome, for example. Is Italian crime fiction tied to its settings more than crime fiction from other countries? If so, why?

MS: I could answer with Joe R. Lansdale and Texas, James Lee Burke and Louisiana, James Ellroy and L. A., Don Winslow and California, so what about the United States? I think that the real reason is that, as novelist, you have to be honest with readers and you have to write about what you really know. How could I set a story in Pescara? I’ve never been there, probably today I could set a story in Berlin where I’d like to live for some months every year. So, I think that if you want to be honest and incisive, and if you want to reveal original angles and point of views in your story, well you have to know the set, the place, the territory very well and, more than this, you probably could use the environment and the nature at its very best potential.

(Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Matteo Strukul.)
© Peter Rozovsky 2013