With Solea, the third and final volume of his groundbreaking “Marseilles Trilogy,” out this month in English, Jean-Claude Izzo’s dark, revelatory portrait of the city of his birth is complete. Izzo died of cancer in 2000, but his strategically multiracial and pop-culture-savvy French crime novels spearheaded a Mediterranean noir movement that has since spread to Italy, Spain, Belgium, Algeria, and beyond. Although full of picturesque seasides, beautiful women, gourmet foods, and thriving rai and reggae nightclubs, Izzo’s town isn’t exactly the southern France of glossy tourist brochures or President Sarkozy’s conservative agenda. This is the young, disenfranchised, and disgruntled Marseilles that ultimately exploded in 2005’s nationwide race riots, provoked by National Front agitation and years of institutionalized oppression. Continue reading “Solea Completes Jean-Claude Izzo’s Trilogy of Mediterranean Noir”