Their books have the flavor of pasta e fagioliof the sucai or cannoli ; they lose us in the mists of Turin or the Po plain, in the streets of Parma or Cagliari. For a long time, for the French reader, the Italian detective novel was summed up by Giorgio Scerbanenco or Andrea Camilleri – age and taste tending to lean towards one side or the other. Recently, a few inspired authors have taken over the transalpine noir scene, now more frequently translated into French. From the ancients, they borrowed the anchoring in territories and the attachment to social contexts. But they knew how to renew themselves by creating a host of investigator characters, so remarkable that we remember them more than the intrigues they unravel.
Among the authors to (re)discover in this fall of 2024: Piergiorgio Pulixi, whom we have already spoken about in these pages. His first book translated into French, The Island of Souls (at Gallmeister) allowed himself a fascinating dive into Sardinia, into the beliefs and magic of the island following two investigators, Mara Rais and Eva Croce, also heroines of his three following novels. The 2024 vintage of Pulixi, The Black Cat Bookstorecan be confusing as it differs from the previous ones. With his bookseller specializing in detective novels, his two cats named Poirot and Miss Marple, and his reading club, “the Tuesday investigators” eager to solve crimes, it takes the form of an exercise in style, in the style of Agatha Christie on Sardinian soil. But any prejudices against the genre quickly fall away thanks to the main character, the bookseller Marzio Montecristo. Under his appearance as an “old English lady” so cantankerous that his saleswoman prefers to know him away from the store to keep a few customers, he reveals himself to be an outstanding investigator. And the only one capable of flushing out the killer who is traumatizing the city by asking his victim who, of two loved ones, she would prefer to see die before murdering the lucky one before her eyes.
Disillusioned investigators, Monster of Florence…
Another very good surprise, the return of Davide Longo with A simple anger (The Mask/Lattès). After The Bramard Affairwhere he put former commissioner Corso Bramard on the trail, he concentrates this time, as in The Young Wild Animalson his “heir”, Vincenzo Arcadipane. A disillusioned fifty-year-old who fears having lost his senses, he wanders his moods through the streets of Turin until an unusual news item revives his investigative skills. He alone notices all the strangeness of an attack committed against a woman at the exit of the metro, he alone questions the confession so easily obtained from a young man arrested immediately afterwards. We love this character who sucks all day long sucai, these licorice-flavored gums that can only be found in Italy, to better face the depths of the Internet into which his investigation plunges him. A contemporary world about which this man does not understand much, he who is imbued with nostalgia for the Turin of yesterday “when an engineer from Toulon came to rectify the lines of the Fiat factory”, who is divorced but passes by once week to pay alimony to his ex so as not to lose contact and who balks when his therapist orders him to make three appointments on a dating site to move on.
Also note the Commissioner Soneri series, written by journalist Valerio Varesi. If The Lizard Strategyreleased in the spring by Agullo, gets lost in political twists and turns a little too complex to be really convincing, it in no way erases the success of the eight other investigations. We discover in particular the city of Parma and its surroundings, where a very particular atmosphere reigns due to the mists which rise from the Po and which allow many turpitudes and illegalities to be concealed, as evoked by the title of the first opus, The River of Mists released in 2016. But Italian authors don’t just do atmospheric thrillers, they also tackle the major crimes of their country, like Sandrone Dazieri with The Magician’s Sonto be published in mid-January by Robert Laffont. The novel revisits the story of the Monster of Florence, author of eight double murders between 1968 and 1985, by inviting itself into the interstices of the official investigation and offering an original reading, because it is centered on the social environment, to Serial killer enthusiasts.
The Black Cats Bookstore, by Piergiorgio Pulixi, trans. by Anatole Pons-Reumaux, Gallmeister, 288 p., €22.90.
A simple anger, by Davide Longo, trans. by Marianne Faurobert, Le Masque/Lattès, 400 p., €22.50.
The Lizard Strategy, by Valerio Varesi, trans. by Florence Rigollet, Agullo, 352 p. , €22.90.
The Magician’s Son, by Sandrone Dazieri, trans. by Delphine Gachet, Robert Laffont, 192 p., €18.
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