Summer can seem like the perfect time to plan an international vacation, the trip of your dreams to all those exotic spots you’ve dreamed of visiting. Until you check your bank account and realize that the farthest you’ll be going is your local bookstore. Good thing crime fiction from nearly every corner of the globe is there to make your stay-cation as vivid as a real one. This month’s international fare will take you on a business trip to Kobe, Japan to the gritty streets of Naples to the many corners of France.
Seicho Matsumoto, A Quiet Place (Bitter Lemon Press)
A bureaucrat on a business trip receives news that his wife has died—not entirely a surprise, given her heart condition, but when he discovers his quiet homebody of a partner had a secret life in the city, it’s time for him to investigate both her death, and her life. We can’t wait to read this quiet, moody thriller of love, marriage, loneliness, and secrets.
Maurizio de Giovanni, I Will Have Vengeance (Europa)
As part of its re-launch of the World Noir series, Europa has been re-issuing the novels of Maurizio De Giovanni, who was discovered as part of an unpublished author contest in Italy, and whose Commissario Ricciardi series has recently gone on to become an international phenomenon. I Will Have Vengeance is the first in a quartet set during the pre-WWII period in Italy, so it’s a good place to jump into De Giovanni’s work. The series is a scathing look at Italy’s descent into fascism—a gritty and cynical portrait of Naples during a tumultuous and fateful era. And if that weren’t atmospheric enough for you, I Will Have Vengeance follows the investigation of a murder inside Naples San Carlos opera house. A perfect summer crime read.
Édouard Louis, A History of Violence (FSG)
A June release, but we missed it here at CrimeReads, so we’re rectifying that now, in August.) Edouard Louis has already made a name for himself as one of the rising voices of French fiction, and his new autobiographical novel is all the more heartbreaking given his difficult youth growing up gay in a French factory town with little tolerance for outsiders. In A History of Violence, Louis uses a novelistic form to process his experiences of being brutally assaulted in Paris, and his complex feelings about returning home to recover. Not so much a crime novel as a novelistic processing of a real life crime, A History of Violence is as disturbing as it is beautiful.
Agnès Desarthe, The Hunting Party (Unnamed Press)
One has to love to a crime of opportunity, and what better way to take advantage of circumstance to commit a crime than a murder in a hunting party? Of course, a hunting party, with its aristocratic resonances in the book’s European setting, is also a perfect take on traditional mysteries involving aristocrats and what we’d call a “locked-room excursion.” The Hunting Party is not strictly a crime story, but more a meditation on the meaning of violence, with a look at historical crimes.
Pascal Garnier, Gallic Noir: Volume 2 (7/10) (Belgravia Books)
Belgravia Books continues to bring reissues of classic French crime fiction to the international masses, including all of Pascal Garnier’s darkly funny tales of life on the edge. The second volume of Garnier’s collected crime fiction includes four of his works, and as a paperback available for under $20, this one may be the best bargain on the list (so if you take it to the beach, and get a little water on it, you won’t feel that guilty…)
