#publisher Books RSS feed Thrillers RSS feed Fiction RSS feed Culture RSS feed Travel RSS feed Marseille RSS feed France RSS feed Europe RSS feed Life and style RSS feed French food and drink RSS feed -- * Books Garlic, Mint, & Sweet Basil: Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction by Jean-Claude Izzo – review -- Jump to comments (…) Le Panier, one of the oldest area in Marseilles, France. "Wherever you are from, you feel at home in Marseilles" … Jean-Claude Izzo on his hometown. Photograph: Alamy 1. Garlic, Mint and Sweet Basil -- Izzo published his first novel at the age of 50 in 1995. Total Chaos – part of the Marseilles trilogy, which is published for the first time in the UK this month – helped define the crime sub-genre now known as Mediterranean noir. Izzo died just five years later. He began -- new collection of essays – which sadly are undated – is a paean to the life, cities and food of the Mediterranean, particularly his home, Marseilles: "Wherever you are from, you feel at home in Marseilles." The world is full of beautiful cities, but Marseilles has an inner beauty: "her humanity". A former communist and the "son of an exile" (he had an Italian mother and a Spanish father), he writes passionately about the city's "hospitality, tolerance, respect for others". He writes with equal passion about the "poor man's cuisine": "When I eat, I like to feel Marseilles pulsating beneath my tongue." Writing crime fiction, says Izzo, is not a form of activism, but "a way of conveying my doubts, my anxieties, my joys, my pleasures". His essays, too, -- Close this popup Garlic, Mint, & Sweet Basil: Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction by Jean-Claude Izzo – review This article was published on the Guardian website at 16.17 BST on -- Travel * Marseille · * France · * Europe