Marco "Alligator" Buratti
Created by Massimo Carlotto

MARCO BURATTI also known as ALLIGATOR (now there's a name you can, uh, sink your teeth into) is a former blues singer and ex-con now working as a private eye in Venice. And rest assured that his partners, Rossini and Max the Memory, are every bit as shady as he is.

In The Colombian Mule, the first of his eight novels to be translated into English, Alligator and his pals set out to defend an art smuggler, from charges of drug smuggling -- but a deranged drug dealer make things difficult.

Massimo Carlotto has been called "the best living Italian crime novelist," and he's certainly seen the world of crime and punishment up close. He's an ex-con himself -- in 1976, Carlotto, at that time part of the Italian left-wing movement, discovered a woman bleeding from numerous stab wounds. In an ultimately futile attempt to save her, his clothes became stained with blood, and he was arrested for the woman's murder. The cops didn't buy his story, and just before the end of his appeal ,his own lawyer advised him to run, thus beginning a long flight from the authorities that lasted several years and took him to to Paris and Mexico, where he was betrayed and turned in by another lawyer. He was arrested, tortured, and shipped back to Italy, where he was eventually sentenced to prison. In 1993, though, he was ultimately pardoned, and began writing.

The Alligator novels have been very successful in Italy and have recently been translated into French, German and now, English.

NOVELS

• La Verità dell'Alligatore
• Il Mistero di Mangiabarche
• Nessuna Cortesia all'Uscita
• Il Corriere Colombiano (AKA 2003, "The Colombian Mule") . Buy this book
• Il Maestro di Nodi (AKA 2005, "The Master of Knots). Buy this book

RELATED LINKS

• Massimo Carlotto: Il portale del Noir
  The author's official web site (in Italian).

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.