Criminally Hot?

Crime is rife in Italy. So are crime-writing festivals.

And kicking off this new season is the Brescia crime fest called A Qualcuno Piace Giallo, which is an Italian wordplay on the title of Billy Wilder’s 1959 film, Some Like It Hot. Giallo (which means “yellow” in Italian) is the generic name for all crime fiction in a country where the very first pulp crime publications were produced with distinctive yellow covers by Mondadori back in the late 1920s. So, this event could be paraphrased as “Some Like It Criminally Hot.”

This is the ninth edition of a festival which has always managed to attract big names, not only from the world of Italian crime-writing, but also internationally. Indeed, the strength of the program is its immense variety. It runs from March 16 to 22 in various conference venues in Brescia, a busy town near beautiful Lake Garda that boasts a memorable historical center, extensive Roman ruins, a lot of art museums, some fine churches, and a wealth of fabulous restaurants.

This year there are four main strands to the program: Italian crime writers, notably Giuseppe Genna, Loriano Macchiavelli, Piero Colaprico, and Biagio Proietti; young Italian writers, such as Patrick Fogli and Simone Sarasso, and the dynamic foursome known as Kai Zen (Jadel Andreetto, Bruno Fiorini, Guglielmo Pispisa, and Aldo Soliani, who write together via the Internet and met for the first time at the publishing party for their debut novel!); big-name historical crime writers, including Andrew Taylor (I will be talking to him about Bleeding Heart Square), Peter Tremayne (author of the Sister Fidelma series), Valerio Massimo Manfredi (a writer whose novels sell millions of copies in Italy, he’ll be talking about his latest, Ides of March), the Italo-American Ben Pastor (after the Third Reich, she has turned her sights more recently on ancient Rome); and, finally, German crime writers, Arne Dahl and Gisbert Haefs, who will introduce us to a world that we may not know very much about.

Add to this a solid program of films and TV series, related theatrical events, thematic concerts, surprise appearances (there’s a whisper going around about a possible visit from American medical-thriller writer Robin Cook), and what do you get?

A potentially great crime festival.

I’ll be back in a couple of weeks to report on what actually happened.