New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Bitter Lemon Press 2004 Jan-March

File Updated: 16/12/2006

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Bitter Lemon Press JAN-MARCH 2004

Tonino Benaquista Holy Smoke Pbk published January 2004 by Bitter Lemon Press at £8.99 ISBN: 190473801X

See Review by Cath Staincliffe author of the popular Sal Kilkenny mysteries and the series creator of TV Blue Murder
See Review by Bob Cornwell

Translated by Adriana Hunter

"Energy, humour, fast-paced action and florid storytelling... Benacquista doesn't hold back." LeNouvel Obsen'ateur
"To read this novel is like savouring a wonderful pasta dish. Perhaps a spaghetti aglia e olio, a harmony of fresh pasta, the deep perfume of olives, the bite of garlic and the quiet power of parmesan." Le Dauphiné Líberé

Holy Smoke is set in the Italian working class suburbs of Paris and in Southern Italy. Tonio, the son of immigrants, is confronted with his distant origins when he inherits a vineyard from an assassinated friend. Gangsters, cardinals and miracles are all ingredients in this black comedy that won three prestigious awards in one year: the Grand Prix de la Littérature Policiére, the 813 Trophy and the Prix Mystére de la Critique. It has been successfully translated into Spanish, Italian and German, and in France alone it has sold over 70,000 copies. This is the first Benacquista novel to be published in English.
The action in Holy Smoke begins when Tonio agrees to write a love letter for Dano, a low-rent Paris gigolo. When Dario is murdered, a single bullet to the head, Tonio discovers that his friend has left hii-n a small vineyard somewhere east of Naples. He decides to go to Italy, to return to his roots, where he is welcomed as a foreigner and a tourist.
But things get complicated when he finds out that others have taken an interest in the miserable plot of land. The wine is undrinkable but an elaborate scam has been set up. The smell of easy money attracts the unwanted attentions of the Mafia and the Vatican, and the unbridled hatred of the locals. Tonio seeks the protection of Sant' Angelo, in whose memory a chapel was erected in the middle of the vineyard. But things begin to spiral out of control when the villagers believe they have witnessed a 'miracle' and soon Tonio finds himself on the run...

Holy Smoke is a darkly comic iconoclastic tale told by an author of great verve and humour. It is also an attempt to unearth Benacquista's Italian roots: the small claustrophobic villages of rural Italy, the fathers' war experiences fighting for Mussolini in Albania, and the generous sprinkling of gastronomic titbits. In this story, the author divulges the origin of 'putanesca' sauce, the recipe for the perfect espresso, but above all the metaphysics of pasta. And, as we all know, pasta is a universe in itself....

Tonino Benacquista, born in France in 1961 of Italian immigrants, dropped out of film studies to finance his writing career. After being, in turn, a museum night watchman, a train guard on the Paris-Rome line and a professional parasite on the Paris cocktail circuit, he is now a highly successful author of fiction, film scripts and even graphic novels. Trois carrés snrfrond rouge, a crime story set in the world of Paris art galleries, won the Trophee 813 and sold 50,000 copies. His crime novel Morsures de l'aube also sold 50,000 copies and was made into a much acclaimed film in 2002 with and by Antoine de Caunes. Saga, a satirical take on the world of television, won the Grand Prix des lectrices de Elle and sold over 110,000 copies. Benacquista co-wrote the screen play for the film Sur mes lévres , released last year in the UK as Read my lips, with Emanuelle Devos. His most recent novel (2002) is entitled Qnelqu 'un d'autre.

Adriana Hunter's work has included the crime novels of Louis Sanders, Death in the Dordogne and The Englishman's Wife, as well as Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb. Most recently she has translated Beigbeder's vitriolic attack on the world of advertising, £9.99, and Catherine Miller's explicit autobiography, The Sexual Life of Catherine M.

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Friedrich Glauser Thumbprint Pbk published January 2004 by Bitter Lemon Press at £8.99 ISBN: 1904738001

Translated by Mike Mitchell

"At the end of his life Glauser had ambitious plans for Sergeant Studer, but the five novels he has left us are sufficient to guarantee his hero the place he deserves in the history of crime fiction." LeMonde
"From bitter experience GIauser has painted a portrait of Switzerland you will never see in a travel brochure." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Thumbprint, a European crime classic, was first published in 1936. Since then it has been translated into six languages and is the subject of a much-acclaimed film. This is its first publication in English and is the first of a series of five novels featuring the Swiss police detective Sergeant Studer. The author, Friedrich Glauser, is a legendary fígure in continental crime writing. He was a morphine and opium addict most of his life and began writing Thumbprint while an inmate at the Swiss insane asylum, Waldau. Glauser is often compared to Simenon and had a strong influence on Friedrich Durenmatt. Germany's most prestigious and best-known crime writing award is the Glauser prize.
Thumbprint opens with the death of a travelling salesman in the forest of Gertzenstein and it appears to be an open and shut case. Schlumpf, the suspected murderer, has a long criminal record, has confessed to the murder and has an obvious motive. But Studer quickly concludes that Schlumpf, who has attempted to hang himself in his prison cell, is innocent and so he re-examines the evidence. Two shots were heard in the forest, and the man died ofa pistol shot to the head. Heavily in debt to an influential man in the village, and his family the beneficiary of a life policy that excluded suicide, it appears the victim's situation had been desperate. As Studer's patient investigations continue, all façades break down and it appears that nothing is what it seems. Envy, hatred, sexual abuse and the corrosive power of money lie just beneath the surface.....

Glauser wrote the following letter to his friend Joseph Halperin in 1937. It is a summary of his life:
"You want facts? Right then: Born Vienna, 1896, Austrian mother and Swiss father. Grandfather on my father's side a gold-digger in California (sans blague), on my mother's side a senior civil servant, (fantastic combination, don't you think?). Primary school, three years in high school in Vienna. Then three years at the Glarisegg Reform School. Then three years at the Collége de Genéve. Thrown out shortly before taking the school-leaving examinations.. took them in Zurich. Then Dadaism. My father wanted to have me locked away and place under a legal guardian. Ran away to Geneva... detained in Múnsingen... for a year (1919). Escaped from there. One year in Ascona. Arrested for morphine. Sent back. Three months in Burghôlzli (for a second opinion, because Geneva had declared me schizophrenic). 1921-23 Foreign Legion. Then Paris, washer-up. Belgium, coal- mines. Later hospital orderly in Charleroi. Morphine again. Imprisoned in Belgium. Deported to Switzerland. Ordered to do one year in Witzwíl. Afterwards one year labourer in a tree nursery. Analysis (one year)... To Basel as a gardener, then Wintherthur. During that time (1928/29) wrote my Foreign Legion novel. '30/'31 one year course at the Oeschberg tree nursery. July '31 follow-up analysis. January '32 to July '32. Paris as a 'freelance writer' (as the saying goes). Went to visit my father in Mannheim. Arrested there for forged prescriptions. Deported to Switzerland. Imprison from July'32-May'36. Et puis voilá. Ce n'est pas trés beau."
Glauser wrote in hospitals, mental institutions and prisons. An unstable man, always short of money, he was however always full of ideas - enough for a lifetime of writing. He went from one school to another, but passed his baccalaureate with difficulty. He also attempted suicide. He enlisted in the Foreign Legion (from which he drew a wonderful novel, Gonrrama) and even became a coal-miner in Belgium. He began Thumbprint in the Swiss insane asylum Waldau in 1935 where he was meant to be fully detoxed ofhis deepest addiction, morphine. But he lived a drug dependent life, swallowed up by depression, and his despair never left him. In 1936 he was released and he moved to Brittany with Berthe, his nurse. There he finished all the Studer novels. In 1937 he wanted to move to Tunis but ended up in Nerva, near Genoa. On December 5111 1938, two days before his planned wedding to Berthe, he collapsed at the dinner table and died early next morning.

Mike Mitchell has translated some thirty books. including Simplicissimus and Life of Courage by Grimmelshausen, a collection of Plays and Poems by Oskar Kokoschka, and all the novels of Gustav Meyrink. He edited and translated the acclaimed Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy 2003. His translation of Rosendorfer's Letters back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck German Translation Prize.

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Günter Ohnemus The Russian Passenger Pbk published March 2004 by Bitter Lemon Press at £9.99 ISBN: 1904738028
Artwork by: Cover design: Eleanor Rose. Photo:© Marc Atkins/panoptika.net
See Review by Bob Cornwell

Translated by John Brownjohn
"Grips you from the opening paragraph to the very end." Magazine Littéraire "Simultaneously a road movie adventure, a tight thriller and an elegantly written love story." Der Spíegeí

Harry, fifty, has left it all behind. His books, his furniture, he's thrown out his papers, even his birth certificate, and changed professions. Yesterday he was a novelist, living with his pretty wife, Ellen. They had a daughter, Jessie. Her image haunts him. He would like to have been her guardian angel, an invisible protecting spirit. But Jessie died in an accident. And Ellen disappeared. Writing doesn't come to those without hope and now he drives a taxi, giving his tips to street beggars.
Early one morning Harry picks up Sonia Kovalevskaya in his taxi. She's going to the airport she says, but asks him to drive through Munich, nervously looking through the rear window. Sonia is anxious, suspicious. She is also an ex-KGB agent and the wife of a Russian Mafioso. She asks him to drive to Luxembourg and once there to do her a favour. His is to go to the basement of a block of flats and bring back two suitcases stuffed with cash. Four million dollars to be precise.

Gíinter Ohnemus was born in 1946. He is a novelist, literary critic and translator and he lives in Munich. He has also written three collections of short stories and a bestseller for teenagers. His first novel Der Tiger aufdeiner Schulter received the Tukan prize from the city ofMunich. He won the Alrfed-Kerr prize for literary criticism the same year. The Russian Passenger received widespread laudatory reviews in the print and television medía last year in both Germany and France. This is his first novel to be translated into English.
John Brownjohn has translated more than fifty novels including The Night of the Generals and The Wolves by H. Kirst. His screenplay credits include Das Boot, The Name of the Rose and the recent Polanski film, The Pianist.

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