Lucarelli, Carlo 1960-

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Lucarelli, Carlo 1960-

PERSONAL:

Born October 26, 1960, in Parma, Italy.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Mordano, Italy.

CAREER:

Writer. Host of Blue Night, a television series; editor of Incubatoio 16, an online magazine; teaches writing at Holden School, Turin, Italy and at a prison in Padua, Italy. Singer for Project K, a musical group.

MEMBER:

Gruppo 13, Associazion Internazional Escritor de Poliziaco, Associazione Scrittori-Bologna.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Tedeschi Prize for best new crime novel, for Indagine non autorizzata; Premio Mistery, 1996, for Via delle Oche; International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 2006, for Day after Day.

WRITINGS:

L'estate torbida, Sellerio (Palermo, Italy), 1991.

Indagine non autorizzata, Mondadori (Milan, Italy), 1993.

Vorrei essere il pilota di uno zero, Mobydick (Faenza, Italy), 1994.

Il giorno del lupo, Granata (Bologna, Italy), 1994.

Via delle Oche, Sellerio (Palermo, Italy), 1996.

Guernica (novel), Il Minotauro (Milan, Italy), 1996.

Febbre gialla, La Casa del giallo, 1997, Edizioni EL (Trieste, Italy), 2001.

(With Michele Giuttari) Compagni di sangue (true crime), Casa editrice le lettere (Florence, Italy), 1998.

Autosole, Rizzoli (Milan, Italy), 1998.

L'isola dell'angelo caduto, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1999.

Laura di Rimini, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 2001.

Misteri d'Italia: i casi di Blu notte, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 2002.

(With Massimo Picozzi) Serial killer: Storie di ossessione omicida (nonfiction), Mondadori (Milan, Italy), 2003.

Radio Bellablule: Un noir seriale in quaranta puntate (radio plays), D. Audino (Rome, Italy), 2004.

"GRAZIA NEGRO" SERIES

Lupo mannaro, Theoria (Rome, Italy), 1994.

Almost Blue, Einaudi (Torino, Italy), 1997, translation by Oonagh Stransky, City Lights Books (San Francisco, CA), 2001.

Un giorno dopo l'altro, Einaudi (Torino, Italy), 2000, translation by Oonagh Stransky published as Day after Day, Harvill (London, England) 2004.

"COMMISSARIO DE LUCA" SERIES

Carta blanca, Sellerio (Palermo, Italy), 1999, translation by Michael Reynolds published as Carte Blanche, Europa Editions (New York, NY), 2006.

The Damned Season, Europa Editions (New York, NY), 2007.

SCREENPLAYS

Sembra facile dire tortellino, Pidgin, 1999.

Lupo mannaro, Fandango, 2000.

(Author of story, with Dario Argento and Franco Ferrini) Non ho sonno (released in United States as "Sleepless"), Medusa Film, 2001.

(Author of story, with Giuseppe Bertolucci) Segni particolari, Radiotelevisione Italiana, 2003.

Also author of La tenda nera (title means "The Black Tent"), 1995. Contributor to Medical Thriller, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 2002; Dieci storie per la pace, Piemme (Casale Monferrato, Italy), 2003; and Oltre la nebbia, Foschi, 2004.

ADAPTATIONS:

Almost Blue was adapted as a feature film, Cecchi Gori Distribuzione, 2000; Il giorno del lupo was adapted for television as L'Ispettore Coliandro: Il giorno del lupo, Rai Fiction, 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Carlo Lucarelli, a popular Italian crime novelist, is the author of such works as Almost Blue and Carte Blanche. Lucarelli, who also edits an online magazine and serves as the host of a television mystery series, is a founding member of Gruppo 13, an association of Italian writers whose books are influenced by film noir. In their works, wrote Carlo Donati in the US Italia Weekly, Lucarelli and his contemporaries "administered crimes and violence in strictly necessary doses, probed the darker side of human nature, but with a light touch, creating well-defined characters and precise psychologies, always with a sacred respect for the classic archetypes of suspense (first and foremost, the American masters)."

Almost Blue, Lucarelli's first work translated into English, is part of a trilogy featuring Grazia Negro, a young female detective assigned to a special task force designed to catch serial killers. Negro arrives in Bologna to investigate a murderer who is preying on students at a local university. Dubbed the "Iguana," the killer haunts the city's underground music scene and assumes his victim's identity after each murder. "Grazia's youth, a liability in her routine police work, proves an asset in her probe of late-night hangouts," observed a critic in Kirkus Reviews. The detective's best lead, however, comes from a blind shut-in named Simone Martini, who spends his days listening to an array of scanners, one of which picks up the killer's voice. Noting that the relationship between Negro and Martini "gives this novel its spark," Booklist critic Bill Ott called Lucarelli "a fresh and exciting new voice in Italian crime fiction."

Carte Blanche, the first work in Lucarelli's "Commissario De Luca" series, is set in northern Italy in the final days of World War II. De Luca, a former commander in Mussolini's political police, has recently transferred to a regular unit in Milan when he is assigned a politically sensitive case: the murder of Vittorio Rehinard, a shady lothario and drug dealer with ties to the Fascist Republican Party and the Waffen-SS, who was stabbed to death and castrated. The long list of suspects includes Count Tedesco, the Minster of Foreign Affairs; Sonia Tedesco, the minister's nymphet daughter; and Signori Alfieri, Tedesco's political rival. De Luca's efforts to find the killer are thwarted by the numerous factions operating within the police force, and he is also haunted by his past as an agent for the collaborationist government. As Frank Wilson remarked in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "De Luca has some idea of what has happened to people he has arrested. And he knows that it wasn't nice. So exactly what kind of a protagonist do we have here? An all too human one, I fear, a congeries of inconsistencies and contradictions, courageous up to a point, but willfully obtuse morally. Also surprisingly sympathetic—because Lucarelli skillfully forces us to view De Luca's twisted world from the policeman's own skewed perspective. It makes for uneasy reading." According to a critic in Kirkus Reviews, Carte Blanche "is a smart and stylish crime yarn."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bacchereti, Elisabetta, Carlo Lucarelli, Cadmo (Florence, Italy), 2004.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 1, 2001, Bill Ott, review of Almost Blue, p. 301; May 1, 2006, Bill Ott, "A Hardboiled Gazetteer to Italy," review of "Grazia Negro" series, p. 10, and review of Carte Blanche, p. 35.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2001, review of Almost Blue, p. 1169; May 15, 2006, review of Carte Blanche, p. 499.

Library Journal, July 1, 2006, Lisa Rohrbaugh, review of Carte Blanche, p. 66.

Philadelphia Inquirer, August 23, 2006, Frank Wilson, "Carte Blanche: Character Study Disguised As Cop Story."

Publishers Weekly, May 8, 2006, review of Carte Blanche, p. 47.

Times (London, England), August 21, 2004, Marcel Berlins, "Crime Round-Up," review of Almost Blue.

US Italia Weekly, March 26, 2006, Carlo Donati, "When Italian Mysteries Thrill Americans," p. 3.