Scerbanenco

Published in Paris by Presses Internationales, the Inter-Police series is rather underrated. It is certainly not considered one of the great crime fiction series in France, and is nowadays largely forgotten. Nevertheless, it published some 115 novels of international crime fiction between 1959 and 1965. Many of them would have actually deserved to be included in the much more prestigious “Série Noire” or “Un Mystère” series. Inter-Police featured a number of renowned international authors, starting brightly with Scerbanenco and McBain (as Evan Hunter, with Don’t Crowd Me, 1953), translated as Alerte aux baigneurs ! (n^o 3, 1959).

The first book in the series was Visa pour la morgue (Green Light for Death) by famous American Pulp Magazine writer Frank Kane (1912-1968) Continue reading →

The Club del Misterio Series (early to mid-1980’s) predates the Etiqueta Negra Series (mid- 1980’s to mid-1990). Both Series are devoted to Crime Fiction. Both have appeared post-Franco, and in a cultural context profoundly changed by the Movida. Both have published around 150 books of international Crime Fiction, the majority of them considered classics of the genre. While Etiqueta Negra is a series launched by a Madrid publisher, Jucar, Club del Misterio belongs to a Barcelona-based publisher, Bruguera.

But the most striking difference is their respective scope. The Madrid publisher puts the emphasis on selection and distinction. There are fewer authors, representing fewer countries, and a distinctive branch within the crime genre, the noir novel. On the contrary, the Barcelona series favours diversity : different subgenres, different authors, different countries. It is remarkable that the author most published in this series is Italian (Scerbanenco). Rather than American (or Spanish as is at the time the pattern elsewhere, when only local authors seem capable of resisting the American -and to an extent English- dominance). Continue reading →