Crime novels in translation were few and far between for the first two months of 2024, but March brings with it a deluge of mysteries and thrillers from across the globe. Below, you’ll find five highlights from the month in globetrotting literature, including a brutal French noir, a haunting Japanese mystery, and a cynical Scandinavian parody, among others.
Tanguy Viel, The Girl You Call
Translated by William Rodarmor
(Other Press)
Viel’s latest demonstrates an acute sense of the imbalance of power and the gradations of control accompanying gendered violence and sexual exploitation. In The Girl You Call, an aging boxer finds his comeback disrupted by revelations about his daughter, coerced into an arrangement by his boss, the mayor. Tanguy Viel writes some of the sharpest, most cynical, and most insightful prose around, and his new novel is particularly dexterous and disturbing.
Seicho Matsumoto, Point Zero
Translated by Louise Heal Kawai
(Bitter Lemon)
In this welcome reissue of a lost classic from 1959, a young woman is wed to a businessman via arranged marriage, only to have him disappear soon after their honeymoon. She barely knows the man, much less what could have happened to him, but still finds herself in dogged pursuit of the unvarnished truth. The immediate post-war era in Japan looms large as the backdrop to understanding the context of her husband’s disappearance, and her own reasons for searching.
Andrey Kurkov, The Silver Bone
Translated by Boris Dralyuk
(Harpervia)
Andrey Kurkov’s new historical mystery, set in 1919 Ukraine as the Russian Civil War rages, has been earning rave reviews on both sides of the pond (it’s even longlisted for the International Booker Prize!). This atmospheric foray into the souls of men in dark times deserves all the praise its getting, and then some, with a deeply resonant plot and a mad scramble to the finish.
Marina Yuszczuk, Thirst
Translated by Heather Cleary
(Dutton)
The Latin American horror wave continues! If you liked last year’s Our Share of Night, the 1970s-set literary vampire novel from Mariana Enriquez, then you’ll want to read Thirst immediately. In Marina Yuszczuk’s gorgeously written gothic, a centuries-old vampire living in Buenos Aires forms a magnetic connection with a haunted mother as both seek endless nourishment for an impossible-to-fill void.
Johan Harstad, The Red Handler
Translated by David Smith
(Open Letter)
This book is so weird (in the best possible way). The Red Handler is a riotous metafictional parody of the genre travails of literary authors trying to make a buck. Harstad’s disillusioned detective novelist once published a 2,000 page tome reviewed by all and read by none. After his first, spectacular failure, he turns to the adventures of a fictional detective to earn some quick cash, thus setting the groundwork for this book’s central conceit: we are reading the complete, annotated works of an egotistical litfic bro turned terribly mediocre crime writer whose detective does nothing much at all. You will laugh. You will cry. You will feel like smoking a cigarette. I can’t recommend this bizarre and hilarious work enough.
