“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 new city politics (the city has been run by a Green-Left coalition since the rightwing former mayor retired last year after a quarter-century in the job). Izzo’s lesser known collection of essays, Garlic, Mint and Sweet Basil, is a love letter to his native city and the Mediterranean that laps it. “Wherever you are from,” he writes, “you feel at home in Marseille.”
