Un anno in giallo

A Year in Yellow collects 12 short stories, one for each month of the year; each author has chosen “his” month, setting there, in that time of the year, a story with “his” detective. Opening the collection with the month of January is, of course, Andrea Camilleri, the progenitor, the one who has imprinted the mystery novel with an unrepeatable mark, creating with Inspector Montalbano a character who is firmly established in the minds and hearts of his endless readers from all over the world.
Then, month after month, all the other detectives: the institutional ones like Antonio Manzini’s Vice-Petty Officer Schiavone, Inspector Petra Delicado with Alicia Giménez-Bartlett’s Vice Fermín. The detectives by chance: the very Sicilian Saverio Lamanna and Lorenzo La Marca so similar to their authors, Gaetano Savatteri and Santo Piazzese, the bibliotherapist Vince Corso invented by Fabio Stassi, the TV author Carlo Monterossi, a character by Alessandro Robecchi, and Kati Hirschel, the bookseller from Istanbul, home of Esmahan Aykol. Finally, the choral investigators: the condominium of the railing house headed by Francesco Recami’s Amedeo Consonni and Marco Malvaldi’s goliardic old men of the BarLume.
Two characters make their appearance here for the first time: the lawyer Cornelia Zac, the product of Simonetta Agnello Hornby’s imagination and legal profession, and the policewoman Angela Mazzola, serving in the anti-robbery section of Palermo’s Mobile, the brainchild of Gian Mauro Costa. The two new detectives we become acquainted with in this anthology will soon be the protagonists of novels.
An exceptional publishing event: after a month in the company of Montalbano, a whole year with the detectives of the Sellerio house for the first time together with 12 unpublished short stories.
“The new school of the Italian giallo is Sellerio-branded. It was not born under a cabbage. It has behind it the tradition of Sciascia and Camilleri, and the infallible taste of Elvira Sellerio, who knew that to give discipline to writers as maximally undisciplined as Italian writers there was no better structure than that, very solid but very elastic, of noir.”
Antonio D’Orrico, LA LETTURA – CORRIERE DELLA SERA
“Praise to the publishers who don’t just look in the mail receipt but bring books to life – to the thoroughbreds of the stable of mystery writers from Camilleri to Giménez-Bartlett, via Malvaldi, Recami, Costa, Manzini…”
Luciano Genta, TTL – LA STAMPA