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I don't know what's in the water there, but some of the best dark crime fiction around is coming out of Italy at the moment. And CRIMINI, a collection of noir short stories, is no exception. Editor Giancarlo de Cataldo has collected together nine stories of generally outstanding quality. If you're a fan of European crime fiction, you'll recognise Andrea Camilleri, Massimo Carlotto and Carlo Lucarelli among the contributors. But the other names, most of which were new to me, suggest there's some great talent in Italy just waiting to be translated into English for a wider audience. This is a superlative collection with only one slightly weak link (Marcello Fois's What's Missing never seemed to get out of first gear). The stories aren't flimsy five-page too-neat cameos, or those that read like the start of a novel. Instead these are well-crafted 30 or so-page pieces where the writer has room to manoeuvre. My favourites were the slightly off-beat ones – You Are My Treasure Chest, by Niccolò Ammaniti and Antonio Manzini,is chockfull of black humour and has a disgraced plastic surgeon attempting to retrieve the bag of cocaine he sewed into an actress's breast implant when police raided the clinic. Book editor de Cataldo's The Boy Who Was Kidnapped by the Christmas Fairy (sub-titled A Noir Fairytale) features a small boy, a tart with a heart, a former Lithuanian policeman, a dodgy sports writer and assorted Eastern European baddies. And yes, the characters really make it zing! Giorgio Faletti's The Guest of Honour, which features a journalist trying to track down a missing TV celebrity, moves from languid laid-back bantering to a suddenly really rather creepy ending that stays with you after the story has ended. And there's a showbiz angle in Sandrone Dazieri's The Last Gag, where an ex-stage star gets reluctantly involved in trying to find out who killed his former comedy partner while trying to start up a relationship with a woman who's ambitious for her precocious would-be comedian son. Of the better-known names, Andrea Camilleri (author of the Inspector Montalbano series) comes up with a rather poignant number in A Series of Misunderstandings, where a technician in a phone company thinks he's met his dream woman, but intercepting a phone call has unfortunate results. King of Italian noir Massimo Carlotto's police procedural Death of an Informer is as dark as you would expect, although it could have taken a cut. CRIMINI is an exceptional collection that oozes quality, helped immeasurably by sparky and idiomatic translations from Andrew Brown. One question, though – don't women write crime fiction in Italy?
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, January 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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