DETECting European Audiences

Participants wanted for online survey about European crime TV!

Do you like watching crime series on TV or on streaming services? If so, the DETECt project needs you! Our DETECt colleagues in Rome and Aarhus want to find out which crime shows you like, which are your favourite detectives and which elements of crime series keep you glued to the screen.   The survey can be found here.

The survey is completely anonymous.

Books to Look Forward to from Bitter Lemon Press

Every week, Roberto Marías crosses Rome on foot to arrive at his psychiatrist's office.  There, he often sits in silence, stumped by the ritual—but sometimes crucial memories come to the surface.  He remembers when he was a child and used to surf with his father.  He remembers the treacherous years he spent working as an under-cover Carabinieri, years that taught him how cynicism and corruption are not merely external influences, but also exist within us.  He has lived an intoxicating and crushing life, but now his psychiatrist's words, the hypnotic strolls through Rome, and a meeting with a woman named Emma—who like Roberto is ravaged by a profound guilt—are beginning to revive him.  Moreover, when eleven-year-old Giacomo asks Roberto to help him conquer his nightmares, Roberto at last achieves a true rebirth.  The Silence of the Wave is by Gianrico Carofiglio and is due out in September 2013.

 Film Tie-In Edition, previously published as 'Badfellas'.  The story is violent, pacy and full of black humour.  Imagine the Soprano family arriving in France, settling down in a small town in Normandy.  Fred Blake tells everyone he is writing a history of the D-Day landings.  In fact, Blake is Giovanni Manzoni, an ex-Mafia boss who grassed and is now in the FBI Witness Protection Program.  Having blown his cover a number of times in the US, the FBI finally sends him to France.  A coincidence beyond belief blows Fred's cover yet again and, with the arrival of the shooters from Newark, he is able to dive back into the violent life of crime he misses so much.  The Family/Badfellas is by Tonino Benacquista and is due to be published in October 2013.

The Man Who Loves Dogs is by Leonardo Padua and is due to be published in December 2013.  Cuban writer Iván Cárdenas Maturell meets a mysterious foreigner on a Havana beach who is always in the company of two Russian wolfhounds.  Iván quickly names him “the man who loved dogs”.  The man eventually confesses that he is actually Ramón Mercader, the man who killed Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940, and that he is now living in a secret exile in Cuba after being released from jail in Mexico.  Moving seamlessly between Iván's life in Cuba, Mercader's early years in Spain and France, and Trotsky's long years of exile, The Man Who Loved Dogs is Leonardo Padura's most ambitious and brilliantly executed novel yet.  It is the story of revolutions fought and betrayed, the ways in which men's political convictions are continually tested and manipulated, and a powerful critique of the role of fear in consolidating political power

The Icemen Cometh

In case you missed The Rap Sheet’s alert on two rather interesting TV specials focusing on Scandinavian and Italian Crime Fiction, we have the information for your diaries. We were alerted by critic Barry Forshaw who appears on both shows giving a critical perspective of the importance of translated crime fiction -

NORDIC NOIR: THE STORY OF SCANDINAVIAN CRIME FICTION
BBC4, Dec 20th at 9pm

Draw the curtains and dim the lights for a chilling trip north as Timeshift investigates the success of Scandinavian crime fiction – and why it exerts such a powerful hold on our imagination.

‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is a literary blockbuster that has introduced millions of readers to the phenomenon that is Scandinavian crime fiction – yet author Stieg Larsson spent his life in the shadows and didn’t live to see any of his books published. It’s one of the many mysteries this programme investigates as it travels to Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland in search of the genre’s most acclaimed writers and memorable characters.

The programme looks at Henning Mankell’s brooding Wallander series, with actor Krister Henriksson describing the challenge of bringing the character to the screen, and it asks why so many stories have a political subtext. Nordic Noir finds out how Stieg Larsson based the bestselling ‘Millennium’ trilogy on his work as an investigative journalist and it reveals the unlikely source of inspiration for his most striking character, Lisbeth Salander. The programme also meets Jo Nesbo, the Norwegian rock star turned writer tipped to inherit Larsson’s mantle, and Karin Fossum, an author whose personal experience of murder has had a profound effect on her writing.
Narrator: MARIELLA FROSTRUP
Producer/Director: ROBERT MURPHY

ITALIAN NOIR - THE STORY OF ITALIAN CRIME FICTION
BBC4, Dec 27th at 9.30pm
Timeshift profiles a new wave of Italian crime fiction that has emerged to challenge the conventions of the detective novel. There are no happy endings in these noir tales only revelations about Italy’s dark heart – a world of corruption, unsolved murders and the mafia.

Italian Noir features exclusive interviews with the leading writers from this new wave of noir including Andrea Camilleri (Inspector Montablano Mysteries) and serving Judge Giancarlo De Cataldo (Romanzo Criminale) who explains how his work as a real life investigating judge inspired his work. From the other side of the law, Massimo Carlotto talks about how his novels were shaped by his wrongful conviction for murder and years spent on the run from the police.
The film also looks at the roots of this new wave. First Carlo Emilio Gadda (That Awful Mess) used the detective novel to expose the corruption that existed during Mussolini’s fascist regime and then after the Second World War Leonardo Sciascia’s crime novels (The Day of The Owl) tackled the rise of the Sicilian mafia. They established the rules of a new kind of noir that draws on real events and offers no neat endings.

Shot on location in Rome, Bologna and Florence, the film also features Italian writers Carlo Lucarelli and Barbara Baraldi and uses rarely seen archive from Italian television.
Produced and Directed by Francis Welch

Photo © 2009 Ali Karim “Hakan Nasser, Eva Gedin [Stieg Larsson’s Editor], Mark Lawson, Barry Forshaw and Lynda La Plante at The Swedish Embassy London”