Bad Cop, Bad Cop: Jean-Claude Izzo and Mediterranean Noir, by Tom Andes

That was the history of Marseilles, and always had been. A utopia. The only utopia in the world. A place where anyone, of any color, could get off a boat or a train with his suitcase in his hand and not a cent in his pocket, and melt into the crowd. A city where, as soon as he’d set foot on its soil, this man could say, “This is it. I’m home.” -Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos Crime fiction does setting uniquely well. From Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles to Robert B. Parker’s Boston to Charles Willeford’s Miami, crime novels map out the cities we live in and give us the cities we imagine. How much, for instance, does the popular perception of Los Angeles owe to Chandler’s novels and their numerous adaptions? When I was lucky enough to go to Marseilles a couple years ago, I used Jean-Claude Izzo’s magnificent trilogy of novels set there as a guide. We stayed in Les Goudes, the fishing village at the edge of the city where Izzo’s detective, Fabio Montale, lives. Nestled between the metropo...