Crime Fiction FAQ's
Q: why is crime fiction the focus of your publishing?
Q: why rely so heavily on translated crime fiction?
Q: is there a common thread to your crime books?
Q: What countries are important to your list?
Q. Who are your best-selling authors?
Q. More on Carofiglio?
Q: More on Padura?
Q: More on Glauser?
Q: why is crime fiction the focus of your publishing?
A. It is a genre we love when it is done well. Cosy whodunits are not to our taste but entertaining and gripping crime fiction that exposes the darker side of foreign places is what Bitter Lemon is all about. Crime fiction that explores what lies just beneath the surface of the bustling life of cities such as Paris, Havana, Munich and Mexico City.
Q: why rely so heavily on translated crime fiction?
A. Are you still hoping to discover the hidden face of Italian crime by relying on English or American lady mystery writers? Or to explore the starry Havana nights, the hectic energy of the Habaneras, the rum, and the brassy music that sets everything off once the sun goes down by reading foreign writers or those writing from Miami? It must be time to move on to the real thing. Bitter Lemon Press takes you to Havana, Bari and Buenos Aires guided by authors who operate from the inside. Local writers who have had jobs such as prosecutors, journalists or essayists but who now dedicate their lives to the arcane craft of crime fiction writing.
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Q: is there a common thread to your crime books?
A. We like to think they are quirky, literary, seamy, sexy, funny crime books that unveil the darker side of places you're likely to travel to, whether you're a real traveller or an armchair traveller. Travellers will not begin to understand the countries they are visiting while sitting on a beach reading a bestseller brought from home. “Tell me about your crimes and I’ll tell you about your society”. Our crime fiction books have a strong sense of place and shed a different light on local life than a guidebook or a Nobel Prize laureate.
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Q: What countries are important to your list?
A. We have tended to focus on crime fiction from the south, books by Cubans, the French, the Italians, but also the much neglected German-speaking writers. More recently we have added crime fiction writers from Argentina and Belgium.
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Q. Who are your best-selling authors?
A. Our three best-selling crime fiction authors are Gianrico Carofiglio, the ex-anti-Mafia prosecutor from Puglia, Leonardo Padura, a Cuban author living in Havana and, to our surprise, our dead Swiss, Friedrich Glauser, who wrote in the 1940s and had never been translated into English before.
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Q. More on Carofiglio?
A. Carofiglio is one of Italy’s best-selling authors and a member of the Italian Senate, but he made his name as a prominent procuratore della Repubblica. In the nineties, he arrested Puglian Mob bosses like Il Cecato (the Blind Man) and Lo Spazzino (the Street-Cleaner); more recently he broke up a syndicate that enslaved prostitutes and sold their newborn babies. By day, Carofiglio conducted searches and lead trials and now is a politician in Rome for most of the week. By night—or, more specifically, during the early-evening hours—he writes crisp, ironical crime fiction novels that are as much love stories and philosophical treatises as they are legal thrillers.
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Q: More on Padura?
A. Padura, a long-form investigative journalist turned political essayist, screenwriter and crime fiction novelist, describes himself as Cuba’s hardest-working writer. As a Cuban writer, he says, he feels a responsibility to reflect the reality of his world.
Despite his enviable literary gifts, Padura’s great passion has always been baseball. He counts pitching ace and Cuban defector “El Duque” Hernandez among his heroes, and still wishes he could have made a living at Cuba’s official sport. Padura lives with his wife, the journalist Lucia Lopez Coll, in the same Havana neighborhood where he was born and where his father, grandfather and great-grandfather lived before him.
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Q: More on Glauser?
A. Swiss, born in Austria, wrote in the 1940s. He was a morphine addict, spent most of his adult life in psychiatric wards and prison, even did a stint in the Foreign Legion in Morocco. He wrote five crime fiction books with the same hero, the intuitive and overweight Sergeant Studer of the Bern police force.
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