It’s not just the Scandinavians. The Anglo-American domination of the crime fiction genre has been under siege by Nordic Noir for quite some time, but another juggernaut is crashing its way into the genre – the astonishingly varied and exciting crime fiction streaming out of other European countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and others. Examining and celebrating this exhilarating body of criminal work, I’ve tried to bring to the continental countries the enthusiasm I’ve previously shown when writing about Scandinavian crime fiction. From important early writers such as Georges Simenon to more recent giants such as Andrea Camilleri, all the key names (and many new and lively talents) are here in a book I’ve designed as both guide and shopping list for readers. The initial idea occurred to me a few years ago when I was filming the BBC documentary Italian Noir (and its companion, Nordic Noir).
But the crime genre is as much about films and TV as it is about books, and Euro Noir is as much a celebration of the former as the latter. The hottest new genre on television and the big screen – and the one with the most cultural respectability – is crime film drama from countries other than Britain and America. (The Sunday Times has talked about ‘a cross-Channel crime wave’.) And with new films and TV shows about to take the phenomenon to ever more stratospheric levels, even more attention will be focused on foreign crime, with its franker, more graphic treatment of violence and sexuality than the Anglo-Saxon version.
First of all, I think it’s important to set out the parameters of this book. Let me tell you what Euro Noir tries to do – and what it doesn’t try to do. The idea is to present a user-friendly, wide-ranging snapshot of the best achievements (both on the printed page and on screen) of crime not originally written (or played) in English. However, unlike my earlier Nordic Noir (where even in 160 pages it was possible to present a largely inclusive survey), such comprehensive coverage would obviously be impossible in an area which has been producing splendid work from a variety of countries for so many years and with the space available to me in Euro Noir. I’ve tried to pack in as much as I can. I’ve concentrated on Western Europe and I’ve had to be selective, with an emphasis on the contemporary rather than the classic. Even so, you may discover that a favourite of yours is given relatively concise coverage, while someone else may receive what appears to be more generous attention. My rationale was simple. I wanted to present as varied and interesting a picture of the range of foreign crime books and films within the amount of pages available to me, and if some very familiar writers had to be dealt with more concisely in order that new and exciting writers could be given the kind of attention they have not received previously, it was a trade-off I thought worth making. As for the thorny issue of translation: no one is more aware of the inestimable value of that art than I am (as translators who know me will attest!), so I trust I’ll be forgiven an occasional inconsistency in crediting these valuable professionals. Four credits I really can’t miss, though, are Antonio Hill, Paul Johnston, Quentin Bates and Charles den Tex for their valuable conversations about Spain, Greece, Iceland and the Netherlands respectively.
As for the general issue of which authors and books to include, the pitfalls yawned before me. In the final analysis, I was aware that I was (in any case) on a hiding to nothing. Even when working on a massively inclusive two-volume book such as British Crime Writing: An Encyclopaedia, I knew that there were always new writers appearing (often on a weekly basis), along with a host of interesting writers from the past whose work was being exhumed. (The latter is a growing phenomenon these days, particularly with ebook initiatives.) I can only hope that readers will not find the inevitable omissions here too egregious – don’t forget that such omissions have at least meant that other, very worthwhile creators have been included.
Do you consider crime fiction to be a harmless diversion? And do you pack a foreign crime novel when travelling abroad to while away the time on Eurostar? In fact, if you’re not paying close attention to the text, you could be missing an incisive and penetrating guide to the socio-economic and political elements of the countries you’re visiting, freighted in amidst the detection and rising body count. The ever-growing success of crime fiction (other than the British/American model) is built on the awareness among readers that the best writers from Italy, Germany and elsewhere are now regarded as social commentators with quite as acute a grasp of the way their countries work as any serious journalist. (After the Breivik killings in Norway, who was the pundit most often called upon to talk about the influence of the far right in that country? It was, in fact, Norway’s leading crime writer, Jo Nesbo.)
Another corollary of the boom? The popularity of crime in translation may be a modest (but cogent) response to the ‘pull-up-the-drawbridge’ thinking of Little Englanders. As the translator Kevin Halliwell said to me: ‘The extraordinary success of the European crime genre in the UK proves that British readers and viewers are much less insular than some publishers and TV programmers would have us believe. A renewed interest in modern foreign languages – and in translation in particular – is likely to be a serendipitous consequence.’