Dateline LBF: Why some books can’t crack the English market

Yesterday’s Publisher’s Lunch Deluxe dispatch includes a very intriguing item:

In a typical fair encounter, [Michael Cader] shared a cab at the end of the day with team from Italy’s Baldini

Castoldi Dalai. They’re trying to figure out why, though they’ve

sold 2 million copies of Giorgio Faletti’s thriller I KILL in

Italy the last two years (well OK, they need a new title)

— along

with a movie sale, and rights sales in 18 territories, including

Flammarion in France, Goldman in Germany and Bertelsmann in Spain,

they can’t penetrate the English language world. The book is

a psychological thriller set in Monte Carlo, about a cruel, brilliant

serial killer and the investigator who hunts him. Try pchendi@bceditore.it

if you’re interested.

Granted, my Italian really sucks ass. Actually, if it weren’t for the wonders of Google’s “translate this page” feature, I couldn’t figure out anything worth a damn. But based on my cursory research, I think the answer may be due to a few factors:

-I, KILL is almost 700 pages long. In hardcover. And there aren’t enough quality translators around, and possibly, not enough who are willing to spend that long a time translating a huge book like that.

-Serial killer/thrillers might have had its day.

-Guiseppe Genna’s IN THE NAME OF ISHMAEL was translated here a couple of years ago and, I believe, trumpeted greatly by Miramax Books (which, tangentially, looks to be dead in the water now.) To the best of my knowledge, that book didn’t sell so fabulously, which might have handicapped the prospects of other Italian crime writers in North America.

-And most likely of all, North American publishers are simply scared off by anything “foreign,” and crime in translation is still sadly lacking here.

Now, if anyone’s actually read the book and can offer an opinion on its quality, that would be cool, too…