Crime and Punishment
King Bites the Bullet, Crime Pays in New Zealand, and Carvalho’s on the Case in Spain
In a somewhat bizarre development, Stephen King’s hotly downloaded e-novella Riding the Bullet has shot around the globe — in a bricks-and-mortar edition. Though hard-copy versions of the work were originally ruled out by the K-man, our sources say, a dire lobbying blitz on behalf of King’s foreign language publishers has resulted in its techno-retro release on paper for the international audience. Thus the Bullet rides up the Italian list, marking the book’s first foreign language appearance. In addition to Italy, contracts have been signed in France, Holland, Japan, and Germany, where the book is due out this month. We are positively assured that the translated editions will not, however, appear online. For those who are wondering, the literal translation of the title in Italy is Passage to Nowhere.
In the UK, Lee Child’s The Visitor is his fourth thriller involving maverick ex-military cop Jack Reacher, and deals with a serial killer whose modus operandi has forensics experts bamboozled — particularly when the body of Sergeant Lorraine Stanley sends the murder investigation into overdrive. The book has been a hit in Britain, Australia, and “especially New Zealand,” says editor Marianne Velmans, who refused to speculate about the Kiwis’ unnatural appetite for serial crime. Rights to the previous Reacher novels have been sold in 26 countries (and he’s also on the list this month with Killing Floor in Sweden). Child, incidentally, lives in New York. The new one has been sold to the Netherlands (Luitingh Sijthoff), Bulgaria (Obsidian), and the Czech Republic (BB Art), and just published in the US from Putnam as Running Blind. See agent Darley Anderson for rights.
Sweden’s Björn Hellberg is thankful that his eleventh crime mystery The Thanksgiving has stealthily made the list. The book continues the myriad adventures of hero Sten Wall, small-town Swedish crime inspector, who is doing his darnedest to live up to the high standards set by his counterparts in the thrillers of Henning Mankell, Liza Marklund, and other Swedish crime aficionados. See agent Bengt Nordin for rights. Mankell, by the way, is also on the list with The Son of the Wind, which is set in a remote trading station in 1850s-era Africa and follows a Swedish adventurer who “rescues” a bushman boy and brings him back to Swedish civilization. Unfortunately, a murder foils everyone’s plans for a tidy postcolonial encounter. The boy’s search for his identity is the emotional center of gravity for this grim tale, which critics say is rife with “dangerously charged accuracy.” Rights are handled by the Leonhardt & Höier agency in Copenhagen.
Colonial oppression is also on the table in South Africa this month, where Arthur Maimane’s novel Hate No More stakes out a place on the list. For reasons of censorship, we’re told, the book could not be published in South Africa in the sixties, when the story is set. It chronicles the moral complexities of life for an urban black man in Sophiatown, where protagonist Phillip Mokone’s rage against apartheid drives him to an act of violence in an all-white suburb. Author Maimane is a journalist who worked in London for a number of years and returned to South Africa in 1994. Elsewhere in South Africa, readers are donning The Jaguar Mask, a tale by Daniel Easterman about an archaeologist on a dig in the heart of the Mexican jungle, where a centuries-old Mayan city is unearthed. The story, we’re told, is a “vertiginous tale of snaring and netting, old rituals and modern codes, blood-letting and immortality.” You can’t beat that. See HarperCollins UK for rights.
Spain has welcomed back the award-winning Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and his hero Carvalho with the publication of The Man of My Life. Though not currently on the list, the book is set a few months before the end of the millennium, when detective Carvalho finds himself awash in an apocalyptic melange of love, sects, espionage, and death. Montalbán received the prestigious Grinzane-Cavour award this year for his contribution to world literature. Also in Spain, Juan Marsé’s Lizard’s Tongue licks the list with a “terrible yet tender” story that takes place in the years following the Spanish War and focuses on an adolescent boy and his milieu. See the Carmen Balcells agency for both titles. A final note on an off-beat work in Spain: Ana Rosa Quintana’s Taste of Bile explores the lives of women who suffer behind a facade of apparent respectability. The story centers on a glamorous couple whose seemingly perfect lives degenerate in a web of bilious obfuscations, and is apparently based on the real-life experiences of Quintana, who is a Spanish television personality and journalist. The work has sold 100,000 copies thus far, and rights are up for grabs from Planeta.
Italy is burbling about a nonfiction work that’s landed (go figure) on the fiction list: Strictly Confidential, written by one Geronimo, whom our source suggests is actually Bruno Cirino Pomicino, a former minister of financial affairs, who serves up plenty of dish about the last 30 years of Italian politics. The public is sufficiently aroused that they’ve powered the book through seven reprints and sales of 40,000 copies, although no foreign rights deals have yet been consummated. See Mondadori’s Emanuela Canali. And if you’re wondering whether Sandor Marai has ventured back from the grave for one more Campari and soda, well, he has. It turns out the family of the late Hungarian author struck a deal with Adelphi to handle world rights for the author’s entire oeuvre, and, lo and behold, The Performance at Bolzano becomes an Italian bestseller.
In the Netherlands, Kees van Kooten’s biographical work Annie is on the list, detailing the painful progression of the dementia afflicting the author’s mother. This “poignant, witty” account is said to be the last biographical work from the popular Netherlands TV host. Over 50,000 copies have been sold in only four weeks, and none of Van Kooten’s titles have been translated, according to De Bezige Bij, which controls rights. Also making the rounds in the Netherlands, Adam Armstrong’s The Cry of the Panther is said to be a love story set against the magnificent background of the rugged Scottish Highlands, and has been compared to The Horse Whisperer and The Loop. The book is on tap in the UK (Bantam), Germany (Bertelsmann), Italy (Rizzoli), Sweden (Bra Böcker), Finland (Otava), and Norway (Cappelens). See Stephanie Cabot at the William Morris Agency.
