Full list >

Latest reviews

“The city’s most celebrated writer remains the late Jean-Claude Izzo, whose hardboiled trilogy featuring detective Fabio Montale put Marseille polars on the map in the 1990s. It still reads well today, even if Izzo’s Marseille has changed as a result of investment and a...

— The Guardian, Feb 5 2021

There's an evoking area of European crime fiction known as Mediteranean Noir that may challenge the Nordic hold on mystery readers. Its origin can be traced to a revitalization of French mysteries in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprisings. Following those politically unsettling...

— Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, Nov 13 2015

In the summertime picnics, outdoor concerts and films are popular. Turks love to have picnics. If invited to a picnic do not expect sandwiches and a thermos. Turks take a full kitchen, including a barbecue (mangal), bottled gas for making tea, porcelain plates, metal knives...

— Today’s Zaman, Jul 31 2015

"In the beginning is the book. And that moment in which Cain kills his brother Abel. In the blood of this fratricide, the Mediterranean gives us the first noir novel." When it comes to Euro-Noir, I reserve a special place for the work of Jean-Claude...

— May 26 2013

Izzo published his first novel at the age of 50 in 1995. TOTAL CHAOS – part of the Marseilles trilogy, which is published for the first time in the UK this month – helped define the crime sub-genre now known as Mediterranean noir. Izzo died just five years later. He began...

— May 10 2013

I haven’t read Jean-Claude Izzo’s Mediterranean trilogy, the modern noir series that made him famous, nor have I visited his beloved Marseilles. Reading GARLIC, MINT, & SWEET BASIL: ESSAYS ON MARSEILLES, THE MEDITERRANEAN, AND NOIR FICTION, a collection of his short...

— Apr 12 2013

GARLIC, MINT AND SWEET BASIL is a very motley collection, extremely generously spaced out over just over a hundred pages. Promising in its subtitle Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction, few of the pieces are full-fledged essays — though they do cover...

— Apr 3 2013

Paris is freezing, and when his friend Titi dies curled up in the subway, Rico decides to head for Marseilles, drawn by the sun and sea, and by memories of his youthful love, Léa. So begins the graceful, slow-motion ballet of Rico’s journey to the coast—and back through...

— Oct 1 2008

"A Sun For the Dying" (Reviewed by Guy Savage AUG 25, 2008) “When you were on the street, you lost your bearings, there were no rules anymore. Only the naïve believed in the solidarity of the poor. Like many others, Rico had found that out soon enough. On the street,...

— Oct 1 2008

It's an icy winter in Paris, but Rico, the destitute protagonist of A Sun for the Dying, knows how to survive on the streets. He has a decent "crash pad", a vacant building whose Madagascan security guard buys him coffee and croissants, and thanks to his bookish comrade Titi,...

— Sep 12 2008