Euro Noir

The Pocket Essential Guide to European Crime Fiction, Film & TV

Barry Forshaw

• Publisher: Pocket Essentials
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781843442462
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Euro Noir examines the astonishing success of European fiction and drama which is often edgier, grittier and more compelling than some of its British or American equivalents, and provides a highly readable guide for those wanting to look further than the obvious choices.

Euro Noir provides the perfect shopping list for what to watch or read before that trip to Paris, Rome or Berlin.

The invasion of foreign crime fiction, films and TV (not just the Scandinavian variety) has transformed the crime shelves of bookshops and DVD stores. But the sheer volume of new European writers and films is daunting and there is a keen need for a guide to the field. Euro Noir presents a roadmap to the territory and is the perfect travel guide to the genre. From Italy, such influential authors as Andrea Camilleri and Leonardo Sciascia and Mafia crime dramas Romanzo Criminale and Gomorrah, along with the gruesome Gialli crime films. From France and Belgium, important writers from Maigret creator Georges Simenon to today's Fred Vargas, cult television programmes 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 such as Jakob Arjouni and Jan Costin Wagner, crime films including Run Lola Run and The Lives of Others. Along with the best crime writing and filmmaking from Spain, Portugal, Greece, Holland and other European countries.

'An informative, interesting, accessible and enjoyable guide as Forshaw guides us through the crime output of a dozen nations' - Times

'An exhilarating tour of Europe viewed through its crime fiction' - Guardian

Look out for the other books in Barry Forshaw's Noir series, Nordic Noir, Brit Noir, American Noir and Historical Noir, and for his latest book, Crime Fiction: A Reader's Guide.

Appendix One

Publishing Translated Crime Fiction: The Pleasures and Pitfalls

I asked a variety of publishers what they considered to be the pleasures (and pitfalls) of publishing European crime writers in the UK in translation. I also asked if there was one book and one author that they had worked on which they found particularly gratifying.

Gary Pulsifer, Arcadia

The pleasures of publishing are multitude but it’s always great to bring literature from around the world into English. Arcadia publishes writers from some 60 countries to date – and crime in translation is a fantastic vehicle to look at societal ills and interactions in particular countries. There is also the joy of recognition and discovery – and the ‘ping!’ of making foreign connections. I’m no different from other crime readers in hooking on to particular characters or series: Paul Johnston’s Alex Mavros crime novels set in contemporary Greece are particular favourites of mine. (They are written in English but are now appearing in Greek editions.) And translated crime fiction provides an antidote to the luxury product-placement writing of the likes of Patricia Cornwell!

You ask about the pitfalls. Well… Here’s an onerous one: pushing hard to establish unknown writers who can take quite some time to establish themselves in English – or, sometimes, not at all. And translations don’t come cheap, even with generous subsidies.

Arcadia Euro Crime authors I’ve enjoyed working with include Petros Markaris, Dominique Manotti, winner of the International Dagger for Lorraine Connection, and Nicolas Freeling, who was in a sense part of the Praetorian Guard of international crime writers. Even though his fiction was written in English, his territory was very much part of that nascent EEC, covering the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. Who can forget the wonderful Van der Valk?

At the moment I’m finding it particularly gratifying to publish the work of the Bergen-based crime writer Gunnar Staalesen. His books feature private eye Varg Veum, a former social worker, and are unusual in Nordic crime for all being set in Norway’s second city. Staalesen exhibits a deep understanding of human nature, not restricted to the underbelly of contemporary urban life, and it should come as no surprise that his books have sold over three million copies and have been translated into 12 languages. Indeed, in Norway there are film and TV adaptations of many of his crime novels. We have stunning new cover designs for both his front list and backlist titles and my dream is for one of the TV channels here to take up the gauntlet. He is after all, in the words of Jo Nesbo, ‘Norway’s Chandler’.

Patrick Janson-Smith, Blue Door

The satisfaction of publishing crime fiction in translation is derived mostly from the knowledge that one is expanding the English-speaking reader’s horizons. The main danger area, especially if one has little or no grasp of languages (personally, I can manage schoolboy French, order up to ten beers and ask to be taken to the airport in German, and gesticulate wildly in Italian), is that one is reliant on the recommendations and reports of others. Other problems include the cost of translation (especially painful if one doesn’t have an American partner) and the translation itself – if it isn’t up to snuff, it’s going to involve a lot of painstaking editorial work.

The book with which I have most enjoyed working is the Croatian-born German author Zoran Drvenkar’s Sorry, a heart-stopping exploration of the darkest aspects of human nature. Very well translated by Shaun Whiteside, in my opinion it’s as gripping and as chilling a thriller as Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon or Pierre Lemaitre’s more recent Alex. Drvenkar himself – tall, angular, a bit of a hippy (granny glasses, ponytail, a teetotaller and vegetarian), with a passion for contemporary music, film and literature, possessed of a great sense of humour – has been a pleasure to work alongside. We are preparing for the publication of his next novel, You, in 2014.

Maria Rejt, Mantle

I well remember the day, returning home on the Number 10 bus, when I began reading the complete translation by Stephen Sartarelli of Andrea Camilleri’s first Inspector Montalbano novel The Shape of Water and was soon completely entranced. Since that journey I have published sixteen novels in the series, and in 2014, in addition to Angelica’s Smile, the seventeenth, Mantle publishes Camilleri’s Hunting Season, a completely captivating historical novel set in 1880s Sicily. The pleasures of publishing Andrea Camilleri are too numerous to mention (wonderful reviews, climbing sales and a very engaged readership to name but three), and the pitfalls are precisely none. Why has it taken so long for the UK market to wake up to the popularity of authors in translation? There has never been any doubt about the importance of publishing translated fiction – where would we be without Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? – but now that the floodgates have opened with European authors providing the stories and characters for some of the most discussed and eagerly awaited crime series on TV it has paved the way for British publishing to catch up finally with our German, French and Scandinavian counterparts and champion literature in translation with every expectation of strong sales and significant media coverage.

So Mantle, my imprint at Macmillan, champions translated fiction on its list and for next year will include a non-European, the Korean author, Jung-Myung Lee, whose novel, The Investigation, begins with the murder of a brutal prison guard in a Japanese POW camp in 1944 and becomes an epic lament for freedom and humanity in the darkest of times; a debut crime novel, Human Flies, by a young Norwegian historian, Hans Olav Lahlum; and the concluding volume of Håkan Nesser’s brilliant Van Veeteren cycle of novels, The G-File, where the retired inspector’s first case also becomes his last. Perhaps the only pitfall remains that the dedicated and talented translators of such authors cannot translate quickly enough!

Ruth Tross, Mulholland Books

Working with foreign crime writers is essentially as rewarding as with good crime writers from the UK: an editor is provided with a bloody good mystery, great writing, and fantastic characters. But added to that, there is, of course, the extra pleasure of what feels a little like a holiday – a change of scene, a new culture, a variation on motives and methods and settings that are as good as a break. The other side of the coin? On a purely practical level, there’s always the question of how clean a translation should be. You want to be true to the original writing – its metaphors and sentences, the atmosphere – without making it sound like it’s simply been run through Google translate. So that’s always a difficult balance. There’s a cliché that crime in translation is easier if it’s set where Brits go on holiday so they have a sense of the place already! I wonder how many people would be enticed by a novel set in the post-industrial concrete cities of Bulgaria, say… which means sometimes you have to persuade people they’re interested in the country or city, though I do believe that is less of an issue these days.

Of my own authors, I am particularly proud of The Frozen Dead by the French author Bernard Minier – partly because it’s the first crime in translation that I acquired, partly because I love the feeling that I am bringing a new author to a wider audience, and partly because it’s just a brilliantly written book! An isolated snowbound town… an asylum for the criminally insane… a cop with a fondness for Latin tags – what else could you ask for? I’d also mention Lonely Graves, the first book in the Posthumus Trilogy by Britta Bolt (the nom-de-plume of the German Britta Bohler and the South African Rodney Bolt).

Ilaria Meliconi, Hersilia Press

The main problem for a small publisher today – in a very down to earth fashion – is, simply, money: publishers nowadays need to be genuinely remunerative if they publish for a living, not as an expensive hobby! The rise of self-publishing has also lowered (if not removed completely) the barriers to publishing. Publishers performing the function of gate-keepers has also changed. Add to that the relatively high cost of buying books (at least in paper form, and when not discounted), and it is clear why readers are therefore very wary of purchasing books by debut and translated authors. As a publisher, when you read a good review, or receive an email from someone asking when the next book in a particular series is going to appear, it is very satisfying. I am also very involved with the translation and the editing. Being an Italian speaker (we publish Italian writers), I read the books in the original, then I read the translation and sometimes discuss points with the translator, which makes me feel much more part of the process. I’m a great believer in the fact that if the translation is up to standard, a good book is a good book regardless of the language it was written in.

I really liked working on Giorgio Scerbanenco as he is so highly regarded in Italy – I enjoyed the feeling I was working on a classic. And I really admire his dry, sometimes cynical style: his work explores traits that are key components of human nature. It shows what an excellent observer of people he was, and what an amazing imagination he had. The historian in me thinks that I should write a book about him!

Daniela Petracco, Europa Editions

The best part of publishing crime fiction in translation in the UK is the satisfaction I get in bringing new authors, new stories, and innovative writing into a vibrant literary landscape. Translated crime novels can be viewed as cultural travel guides (complete with body count): to borrow the words of one of our authors, Brazilian writer Alberto Mussa, ‘what defines a city is the history of its crimes’. At Europa Editions, our agenda is to bring to British readers books that entertain and inform, books that confront global themes through the metaphor of investigation of international crime in its local manifestations. British society is a book-loving one, and a fluid one, and little by little it is opening up to a wider range of literature from around the world. It’s encouraging to see crime fiction in translation gradually leaking into the mainstream… it’s already happened with a number of Scandinavian writers and I believe it will happen more frequently in future with writers from other countries.

Personally, if I have to pick titles I’m particularly proud of, then it would have to be three books; the three parts of Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles Trilogy. Total Chaos, Chourmo and Solea are exactly the kind of works that fulfil our aim, taking the reader right into the heart – and underbelly – of Marseilles, the city in Europe with the highest incidence of gun crime. Izzo writes of Marseilles’ legendary organised crime scene and corrupt, violent police force, its culturally diverse society and its conflicts, but also about the sounds and smells of the city, and even the flavours of its cuisine.

Christopher MacLehose: MacLehose Press

In the field of crime fiction I do not think that taste in reading follows any group or any nationality. I believe that readers will go wherever there is exceptional quality. If there are now shelves in bookshops marked ‘Scandinavian Crime’ that is because we have seen an exceptional flowering of great storytelling from a relatively tiny corner of the world within three decades. Sjöwall/Wahlöo, Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell, Karin Fossum, Arnaldur Indriðason, Jo Nesbo, Håkan Nesser, Stieg Larsson, Åsa Larsson. These, to my mind, are the cream of the cream. They have made a remarkable contribution to the shape of present-day reading habits outside and inside Scandinavia. They have, by their sheer excellence, sown the seeds for the falling off of the very genre they represent, have made world famous. So many publishers have bought so many writers of crime novels from Scandinavian writers and sold them into translation. So many and too many. To the point that readers are already expressing disappointment. The best may be past.

We did not set out at the MacLehose Press either to turn our backs on Swedish or Icelandic crime writing or to raise a new standard elsewhere in Europe. It has, however, happened naturally that we have – from among the hundreds of noir fictions that we receive every year – found ourselves publishing a group of storytellers writing in French who are in no sense a group. They are Antonin Varenne, Pierre Lemaitre (who has just won the Prix Goncourt with a novel that is not a crime novel), Hervé Le Corre, Karim Miské, Dominique Sylvain, Xavier-Marie Bonnot and the Swiss writer Joël Dicker, whose novel The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair was last year also shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt and has sold a few short of a million copies. Dicker’s novel is not at all, nor does it set out to be, a conventional crime story. It is a crime story, but it is also a mystery and also a love story.

Such energy, such variety, such cleverness and such rich characterisation among the novels of this group. And such excellent translations too. I have always thought that a crime novelist deserved the best possible translator – such talents as Frank Wynne, Siân Reynolds, Laurie Thompson and Nick Caistor. In present-day France, for instance, is a variety of languages and vocabulary to test the very best. Anyone who watched the television crime series Engrenage or Spiral will know the sheer and wilful complexity of those voices, and will also surely have sensed that the baton was passing – before their eyes, as it were – from Scandinavian crime on television too.

Trisha Jackson, Macmillan

What I particularly enjoy about publishing crime in translation is being able to bring the sense of place and atmosphere of the cities or countryside of Europe to the page in the UK. We’re extremely lucky to have authors who can not only tell a compelling crime story but also have the literary skills and talent to transport the reader to, for example, the forests, fjords and mountains of Norway; to the exciting but intimidating and grisly side of Stockholm’s dark underbelly or even, although a re-imagining, Sarah Lund’s bleak, but beautiful Copenhagen. The pitfalls – well I guess you have to trust a clean translation that is true and sympathetic to the original. Oh to be multi-lingual! A writer I’m proud to have brought to a UK audience in 2013 is German bestselling author, Nele Neuhaus. A book which has sold over 3 million copies across the world, Snow White Must Die became an Australian bestseller early in the year and was then selected for Richard & Judy’s WHS autumn book club. The reason is quite sim...