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Pietro De Palma: Ellery Queen in Italy
As to articles and
essays on
mystery and crime novels go, on his blogs
"La morte sa leggere", "The
Blog del Giallo Mondadori.",
and on
The Sherlock Magazine Web (Italian) he wrote,
among others: "The First Four Carr Tales"
and "Meta-critique
of
The
Third
Bullet", both
focusing on the works of Carr,
a retrospective on Rufus
King, and last but not least an article on The Siamese
Twins Mystery
by Ellery
Queen.
Kurt Sercu |
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Q:
What is the current importance
of detective fiction in
Italy?
As you mentioned before, Italy is one of the few countries in which
publishers continue to publish
classic mystery novels, and
Ellery Queen novels are
re-issued often.
One
could say that in
Italy
only
a
few years
ago, classic
detective novel
were
published
with only
newsstands sales in mind.
These “pulp” versions of
mysteries were very much aimed
at that market. In
the
past there were
many
publishing houses,
mostly
gone
nowadays,
that each
published a
myriad of
novels. Very few of these
publishers have withstood
the
test
of
time, in fact only one,
Mondadori,
still
publishes
monthly
newsstand editions --
two
unpublished
novels
(hard-boiled,
mystery,
thrillers, etc.)
and
two
reprints of
novels each month. Last
spring they introduced yet
another monthly publication:
"The
In
bookstores
in
Italy
for several
years there has been
a real
explosion of
"noir" crime fiction.
It had seemed
that interest in the classic
mystery
had finally
disappeared,
and only
Mondadori continued to offer
works in that
niche,
publishing classic novels by
writers
such
as
Ellery
Queen,
C. Daly
King,
John
Dickson
Carr,
Ngaio
Marsh,
Agatha
Christie,
Clayton
Rawson,
S.S.Van
Dine,
Edmund
Crispin,
Christianna Brand,
Henry
Wade,
Patrick
Quentin,
Rex
Stout,
and
Rufus
King,
among others.
Besides these two main resources
for novels and tales of
detective fiction, there are
also others that, with less
economic resources, from time to
time issue new works by great
writers of detective fiction.
Q:
So there's
a great
interest in
Italy
for these kind
In
Italy,
today, there is a deep
economic crisis.
unemployment
is
on the rise
and
there is just less
money to spend.
People
I
know
in
the book trade,
are
deeply concerned about the future of these publications.
This concern is fed by the large
drop in sales figures for books.
Economic concerns may hit the
industry as a whole, with possible
consequences for publisher,
libraries and bookstores. So in essence, only large publishing houses, those that can rely on a predictably stable amount of readers, can reliably plan for the future. As to Ellery Queen, currently a novel is published every six months, by Mondadori.
Yes, sure. Perhaps not "the"
most popular, but surely he is
up there with the three most
popular mystery writers
in Italy: Agatha Christie, John
Dickson Carr and Ellery
Queen.
That's simple, all of them, except "Tragedy of Errors and Others". This includes all the original stories of Ellery Queen, in various collections, a selection of radio plays, novels and all the short stories.
In my opinion, if they would allow such works to be published the full
catalogue should be available
fro readers. In this niche
market (Agatha Christie -
Ellery Queen - John Dickson
Carr) this is a problem,
with only
Agatha Christie as a possible
exception. In fact, unique in
Italy, all her work is available
to the reading public. Not
surprisingly, the last critical
essay devoted to an author in
Italy was John Curran’s
Agatha Christie's Secret
Notebooks published at the
end of 2010.
I
sincerely hope that
his other
study
Agatha
Christie:
Murder in
the Making
will be
translated into
Italian soon.
When we shift focus to Carr, we find that neither of the two most famous
critical studies, those by Doug
Greene and S.T. Joshi, have, in
fact, been translated.
For
Van
Dine,
there is an
introduction in Italian written
by Edoardo Ripari.
As for Ellery Queen, thirty years ago, Royal Bloodline,
Ellery Queen Author and
Detective by Francis M.
Nevins Jr. was published in
installments in volumes
comprising a series dedicated to
Ellery Queen.
These studies have been
sold out for many years.
Given
the non-availability of the work
of some authors author critiques
are limited to those available
on the internet.
There is still an article on the web by Luca
Conti
focusing on
Queen's short stories, my short essay on
The
Siamese
Twins
Mystery,
and
a
somewhat longer article,
in
the form of
presentation by
Oreste
del
Buono,
written
thirty years
ago.
Yes, of course. But it is more pronounced in the case of Ellery Queen. In the case of Carr, in fact, not even the most important essays I mentioned earlier, have been translated. There is a wealth of important essays and articles, available on the internet. And, as stated earlier, Agatha Christie remains the exception to the rule.
Q:
So
how do you
explain
this lack
of critical
works on
Ellery
Queen,
where, in
terms of
number of translations and/or
publications,
Ellery
Queen
remains perhaps one of the
best-selling
authors in detective fiction?
This is a discussion not
confined to Italy, I think, but is also true
for all nations where Ellery Queen novels are published.
For
both John Dickson Carr
and
Agatha
Christie,
important
biographies
have been
published .
These have dispelled
the veils
cloaking the authors’ works
and
especially
the
lives
of
the authors. These works were
followed by several essays
and
critical studies.
For
Ellery
Queen
there is currently
no
authorized biography.
Various
essays
that do exist
are mere reconstructions
and
hypotheses,
related to what
is
known of the
two
cousins and their
rivalry, which resulted
in
hidden references
in
some of their works
such as
The
Siamese Twins
Mystery.
The scholar
Rémi Schulz
has
written an
interesting essay on the subject, on which I have made some additional remarks in an
essay of my own, two years ago.
Q:
Do you think
there is a possibility
that in
future someone will
publish a Italian translation of
"The
Tragedy
of Errors
and Others,"
which
would then again lead to the
availability
of
the entire work of
Ellery
Queen?
New things sometimes happen due to successes in other media and the
influences of other media on the
market,.
An
example could be the success of
a television series or feature
film. Years ago, for example, a
famous Italian publishing house
began to re-publish several
volumes of short stories and one
of the novels of Maurice
Leblanc's Arsène Lupin, after
the release of an Italian film
based on Arsène Lupin.
An
acquaintance of mine, a rather
famous critic, Mauro
Boncompagni, told me some time
ago that in his opinion, to
spark a renaissance of Ellery
Queen, leading to the
publication of The
Tragedy of Errors, we
would likely need to have something like a
movie on the history of
Ellery
Queen.
I
would go as far as stating that
perhaps a full Italian DVD-set
of the NBC Ellery
Queen series,
with
Jim
Hutton,
absent for many
years
on
Italian
television screens,
might do the trick.
We must.
There
is nothing
else we can do.
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