#insomma - battute simpatiche ma vivo anche senza; è stato carino scoprire la sua corrispettiva francese e il finale è figo ma tutto qua)

[shallicomparetheetolagrenouille]

2022 in books

I discovered I like Sellerio’s collections of detective stories - that’s it, I’m done. This is my new addiction. I already own Una notte in giallo and I already have Un anno in giallo and Una giornata in giallo in my sights. Help?

For context: Sellerio Editore is very well know in Italy for its excellent selection of mystery and detective story authors, the most famous of whom is Andrea Camilleri. They have this very recognizable editorial collection of books in the format you can see above: small, dark blue, with a picture or painting in the middle square and amazing paper for its pages (it smells amazing). One of the cutest phrases I read about Sellerio is that the format is so iconic and the content so reliable that the Italian word for detective story (”giallo”, meaning yellow, because in the 30′s a well-known publisher, Mondadori, started selling a very popular collection of detective stories all with a yellow cover) should become “blu”.

Sellerio regularly publishes this type of collection, with eight to ten of their authors all providing a story with a common theme: in this case, they need to solve a mystery in exactly one week. The titles of the installments of this series are a play on “in giallo” = in yellow. A week in yellow, a night in yellow (each story takes up only one night), a year in yellow (twelve stories, each one in one month from January to December), the holidays in yellow (either the detectives/protagonists or the victims are on holiday at the time of the crime), New Year’s Eve in yellow and so on.

My favorites of the stories in Una settimana in giallo have been:

Alessandro Robecchi’s story, which made me find out the lovely Monterossi mini series on Amazon Prime and convinced me to go buy at least a couple of his books (during the next Sellerio sale, next August - I swear I’ve resisted up to now!); the protagonist is a TV content writer (despite his wishes) and, with his actual-detective-friends, he is tasked with finding a reluctant heir to a furtune; all of Robecchi’s books with Monterossi as a protagonist are noirs set in Milan and, if the miniseries is even remotely close to the first two novels, they are delightful. The style is ironic and quick, a pleasure to read and I am definitely hooked

Santo Piazzese‘s idea was a nice detour from the usual organized crime storiline - it was the funniest story of the bunch, incredibly enough, considering the theme! Basically an up-and-coming mafia family use their influence to have a girl employed as a cook in a restaurant long-loved by the protagonist, Lorenzo La Marca (a university biology professor in Palermo), and owned by an old friend of his - except, she’s terrible at it but she has this idea of being a misunderstood genius and the owner cannot get rid of her without fearing repercussions on his restaurant; basically, La Marca finds a way to get her own relatives to remove her from the restaurant and the ending is particularly satisfying for a little mention of a certain character

Fabio Stassi’s search of missing characters from novels. His protagonist, Vince Corso (not a detective, but a psichologist who treats people by prescribing specific books depending on what ails them), falls asleep and dreams of meeting a dead author, who got a leave of absence from Heaven to come back for a few days and help Corso find the characters who started disappearing from books in protest, so they find, for the announced closing of a little library nearby, in Rome. They also find the time to go be interviewed by Fabio Fazio at Che tempo che fa, but only after saying hello to a very friendly Robert De Niro and starting a brawl

The other stories featured actual investigators/policemen or the usual curious-journalist/writer-who-finds-death-wherever-they-go or random people solving small-scale mysteries. Some were more entertaining than others, but the the three above are totally the winners, for me.

A remarkable thing that was actually very touching is the final editor’s note: this is the first “in giallo” collection designed and published after Camilleri’s death and, to honor him, all authors were asked to slip a reference to him or his work in their stories: sometimes it’s the name of a book, sometimes his most famous police commissioner, Montalbano, is mentioned (or disappears from his own novels), other times it’s a quote (book titles slipped in the dialogue or hidden quotes). That was so sweet!

Anyway, I got hooked both by the format (the stories in this are 50 to 70 pages long, more or less, so readable in a quiet lunch break) and by how this lets you have a little taste of authors’ writing style, so that you can see if you would actually like their novels (I am so glad I never picked up Savatteri’s stuff!). So expect to see more pictures like this in the future!