Hey, folks. I'm new to the list, been lurking and decided to
jump in here now that people are mentioning the good French
noir writers. (Yasmina Khadra and Thierry Jonquet have come
up.) The French, maybe not surprisingly, have a terrific noir
tradition, going back to people like Simonin (NOT Simenon)
and Giovanni in the fifties, through Jean-Patrick Manchette
in the seventies, Jean-Claude Izzo's stupendous and very noir
Marseille trilogy in the nineties, and now Khadra, who may be
the blackest of all (bad things going down in Algeria;
Yasmina Khadra is a pseudonym he adopted to avoid slaughter
by one faction or the other). Also Sebastian Japrisot, though
not everything he wrote was noir
(his L'ete meurtrier, translated as One Deadly Summer, is one
of the best crime novels ever, anywhere). I'm not sure how
many of these have been translated into English; as noted,
Serpent's Tail in Britain has brought out a lot of good
continental crime fiction in translation. But these guys are
reason enough to learn French if you don't already read it.
Otherwise, only reader demand will get these deserving
writers translated into English, so start asking around for
them. There's a lot of great writing going on out there. Sam
Reaves (a.k.a. Dominic Martell)
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