Fine Food, Fine Wine, and Crime

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’d signed up to attend the ninth crime-writing festival, A Qualcuno Piace Giallo, in Brescia, Italy. That event was held in the large and comfortable auditorium of the Brescia Chamber of Commerce building, beginning on March 16 and concluding on the 22nd. It gave me the opportunity to listen to a host of crime writers from Italy as well as some from abroad talk about their work. It was also a chance to eat, drink, and make merry with the local foods and wines, which are just about as good as they come. (One tip: The next time you’re visiting Brescia, check out the Raffa Restaurant. Wow!)

The Italian “squad” attending this year included best­-selling writers such as Giuseppe Genna (author of My Name Is Ishmael and Hitler), Valerio Massimo Manfredi (whose latest book has sold 1,900,000 copies, and who spoke at this event about his new one, Ides of March, which appears set for worldwide publication), Antonio Steffenoni (a writer with a rib-snapping sense of humor), and young, upcoming Italian writers such as Patrick Fogli, Barbara Baraldi, Donato Carrisi, and Simone Sarasso (the last of whom confessed over dinner to writing an erotic love story every Sunday afternoon for the sizzling Italian magazine Intimità, in addition to his crime-writing).

The platform of foreign wordsmiths was equally impressive. It included this year’s Cartier Diamond Dagger Award winner, Andrew Taylor (whose Bleeding Heart Square is soon to be released in Italy), Peter Tremayne (who talked about his Sister Fidelma series, set in medieval Ireland), Gisbert Haefs (the German author of a marvelous series of mysteries set in ancient Rome, one of which is The Centurion of Caesar, published in Italy by Tropea), Santiago Roncagliolo from Lima, Peru, but now living in Spain (his book The Holy Week Murders is riding high on the Spanish best-seller list, while his new novel, Red April, will be published next month in the USA by Pantheon), Jean Christophe Grangè from France (Miserere has recently appeared in this country from publisher Garzanti), the Italo-American Ben Pastor (who talked about the Martin Bora series, recently published in Italy by Hobby & Work), and, last but not least, Arne Dahl (né Jan Arnald) from Sweden, whose monumental A Group saga (11 titles so far) has just started to be published in Italy by Marsilio, the first installment being Misterioso. I had a chance during this festival to interview Andrew Taylor, and also interpreted from Italian into English and vice versa for Gisbert Haefs and Arne Dahl.

Pictured, left to right: Luca Crovi, radio journalist; Daniela De Gregorio (the female half of “Michael Gregorio”); Swedish author Arne Dahl; British writer Andrew Taylor; and Michael Jacob (the male half of “Michael Gregorio”).

In between the author appearances, and running late into each evening, there were simply too many films, theatrical shows, and concerts to take in, all of them with a noir theme.

Then on Saturday, to crown it all off, my wife, Daniela, and I went to Milan, where we appeared live on Luca Crovi’s brilliant RAI 2 radio program Tutti I Colori del Giallo along with Taylor and Dahl. Again, I translated those authors’ comments into Italian, so it was really a bilingual edition of the show. Luca Crovi’s program deserves special attention, in that it is one of the few European radio broadcasts which is dedicated to crime writing (along with some great hard-rock music, including an AC/DC exclusive, since that Australian band was in Milan that week). If you’d like to listen to that edition of the program, just click here.

ALSO CHECK OUT: Italian Mysteries.com, “the definitive Web site for English-language mystery novels set in Italy.”