With the title "The Marseille Trilogy," the novels by Jean-Claude Izzo "The Black Song of Marseille," "The Gang," and "Solea," featuring the hero Fabio Montale, are republished in a single volume. This sensitive police officer, a descendant of immigrants, an enemy of violence, who loves poetry, jazz, fishing, women, and his city, Marseille: a crossroads of peoples and cultures, the great port of France.

Marseille, with its port and its people, its streets and its girls, where French racists, corrupt police officers, and fanatic Islamists intersect, while the shadow of the Mafia looms everywhere, provides the ideal backdrop for noir stories.

And the hero, filled with self-doubt, always determined to see things through to the end, continues his wanderings through the streets of lost innocence. Struggling between nostalgia and rebellion, he acts for the sake of camaraderie and friendship with the same enduring humanity.

Izzo, a child of "illegal immigration" like Zidane, has given his city something that the city now returns to him with love and gratitude: a new image, a new life. A legend.

"I envy Marseille. I would love to find one day the bar of Fonfon -rest his soul- and scream to him: 'Patron, un pastis!'. In memory of Izzo." (from the epilogue by Richard Soumet)