Sunday 22 February 2009

Even More Criminal

In the comments to my recent look at Atlantic Books' Crime Classics series, the cunning Tulkinghorn pointed out that I should have a look at the Serie Noir books from Editions Gallimard in France. This extraordinarily long-running series of classic and new crime books includes everything from Jim Thompson to Oedipus Rex.

For much of their time, this series has had uniform, illustration-free covers which use yellow text on a black background, like inverted crime-scene tape. More recently, however, they've gone with a series of evocative monochrome photographs. Looking at these, I wish I had me some French (instead of being the sort of person who swears every time Julian Barnes blithely includes a couple of paragraphs of untranslated Gallicisms in his books).





















4 comments:

Steerforth said...

Fantastique!

Tulkinghorn said...

I'm with you: Gallimard -- especially the typography-only NRF covers -- makes me wish I spoke French. Even though my pretensions don't extend to buying books in languages I don't speak, I made an exception for the Serie Noir editions of a couple of Donald Goines novels whose author photo was of the writer dead in his coffin.

Ian Koviak said...

BAD KARMA is an amazing shot.

JRSM said...

I've been looking up some of these books in English, hoping the covers would be as good, but they're mostly pretty disappointing.