Welcome to our December 2021 Newsletter
A new winter approaches, a new variant emerges and the old travel and social restrictions are coming back. So Halt' die Ohren steif as they say in German, keeping your ears stiff being somehow akin to Chin Up. Have you come across the charming Swedish expression glida in på en räkmacka (slide in on a shrimp sandwich) to describe the life of someone cocooned in privilege? A quirky baseball equivalent is someone born on third base convinced he has hit a triple. Wonderful examples of the need for high artistry needed to properly translate the idioms of the world.
We have the great luck of working with such artists, translators who help us spirit foreign literature over borders. Beautifully translated crime novels should be stuffed in Christmas stockings, so recommendations among books from Bitter Lemon, and indeed from some of our friendly competitors, are found below.
Crocodile Tears by Uruguayan author Mercedes Rosende won the prestigious LiBeraturpreis in Germany. It is translated with verve and wit by Tim Gutteridge. The Times wrote: "Welcome to Montevideo, a city forever besieged by 'a faint smell of garbage'. 'People are morbid and nothing attracts an audience quite like disease or pain or death. Or sex.' Crocodile Tears features the lot. It reads like a marvellous mash-up of Anita Brookner and Quentin Tarantino." A sequel is on its way.
BUY HERE
Suffering from series fatigue, we stumbled on the magnificent Japanese police procedural film High and Low directed in 1963 by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai and Kyōko Kagawa (see trailer LINK). The film is loosely based on King's Ransom by Ed McBain. Both are highly recommended: the film is a masterpiece, the novel stands out in the 87th Precinct Series.
Deep as Death by Katja Ivar has a frosty cover for a frosty season. It is set on the mean streets of Helsinki in the 1950s. Inspector Hella Mauzer has “high cheek bones, huge eyes, and lovely legs”, but, fired by the Finnish police force, she has been reduced to being a private investigator. The story begins with the drowning of a high-end call girl in the capital's harbour. "The misdirection and manipulation of the evidence are worthy of Agatha Christie, but the quirky humour is Katja Ivar’s own," said The Times.
BUY HERE
A PREVIEW. Silver Pebbles by the legendary Swiss author Hansjoerg Schneider is our second novel in the Inspector Hunkler series and is available to preorder now. It comes out in January in the UK and a month later in the US. The first, also translated by the award-winning Mike Mitchell, was called The Basel Killings. " A magnetic central character, a skilful and unhistrionic telling and a dose of political realism make this book a very welcome arrival”, said the Morning Star.
PREORDER HERE
Our two favourite translated crime novels, ever?
Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by the Latin American specialist Alfred Mac Adam. The time the 50s, the place the badlands of Peru, where the local police do not even have a vehicle of their own and must hitch rides on chicken trucks. Need we say more?
Mr Hire's Engagement by Georges Simenon, translated by Anna Moschovakis, a poet and author in her own right. Mr Hire is a peeping Tom, fond of prostitutes, a dealer in erotic literature. But also the prime suspect for a murder that he did not commit. One of Simenon's romans durs, pitiless, dark, yet totally seductive
"Crime novelist Gianrico Carofiglio is a former anti-mafia prosecutor from southern Italy. His popular character Guido Guerrieri, based in the port city of Bari on the Adriatic Sea, is a principled and intelligent lawyer who is mad about books. Throughout the latest in the Guerrieri series, The Measure of Time, as ever, masterfully translated by Howard Curtis, the avvocato keeps a volume at hand to fill any downtime in court—Kafka’s aphorisms, for instance, or Tristram Shandy, which Guido judges 'a very great novel of digressions'." So wrote the Wall Street Journal. BUY HERE
The Foreign Girls by Sergio Olguin, translated by Miranda France. “Olguín’s stunning sequel to 2019’s The Fragility of Bodies finds Buenos Aires reporter Verónica Rosenthal vacationing in the province of Tucumán. When two young women she meets are raped and murdered she resolves to find their killers. Olguín exposes copious examples of moral bankruptcy en route to the devastating ending. Readers will eagerly anticipate the third and final volume.“ Publishers Weekly. BUY HERE
Can't resist ending with a cartoon by Tom Gauld:
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