Nicole Leclerc wrote:
>Scerbanenco is Italian. I remember reading one of his
books but the memory
is very faint. I have the feeling it was hardboiled
though.
Scerbanenco is considered the Italian Cornell Woolrich. He
was not Italian, even if he spent in Italy a great part of
his life and wrote in Italian. He was Russian, born in Kiev
in 1911. He started in the '30s with a series of straight
mystery novels set in Boston, with American characters - a
place, I think, where he had never been. After the war he
rapidly became one of the fastest and most prolific short
story writers in Italy, with literally thousands and
thousands of short stories under his belt, mostly sentimental
in tone and aimed to the late 1950's-early 1960's Italian
female readers. On the other hand, in the late 1960s he
started an incredibly dark series of novels featuring Duca
Lamberti, a physician banned from the profession for
malpractice who is regularly asked to deal with border
situations. Scerbanenco died in 1969. He is considered the
father of Italian noir (which is a very prolific genre, by
the way).
One of Scerbanenco's youngest disciples is Massimo Carlotto,
a young writer from Padova who spent many years in prison for
a murder he did not commit. Today he is one of the most
popular Italian writers, with five novels in the
"Alligatore" series (The Alligatore is a former blues singer
who spent many years in prison, and so on...) and a couple of
standalones (one of which,
"Arrivederci, Amore, Ciao" is a novel worthy of Elmore
Leonard at his best).
Santo Piazzese is a Sicilian mystery writer who has become
quite popular in recent years. He has written three novels,
but I won't define him as hardboiled, though. Nice
atmosphere, very sophisticated stories, not quite Sicilian as
you may know it.
>Izzo I've never read but isn't he the one who killed
himself a few years
back trying to test a method of killing for one of his
books
>and falling from his window to his death in the
process? I think he's
hardboiled.
The one you're talking about is Eugene Izzi, a great Chicago
writer. Jean-Claude Izzo - who also died recently - was of
French/Italian descent. Great French noir with a touch of
Italian fatalism. Read him if you can: he has not written
much ("Solea", after the Gil Evans/Miles Davis tune, is a
very good novel, in my opinion).
Best, Luca
Luca Conti
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