Abstract
Crime fiction has been the publishing phenomenon of Italian literature in the last two decades: immensely popular at home and widely translated abroad. The flourishing and development of this genre has challenged conventional literary canons and is changing the Italian literary panorama. Combining literary experimentation with mass-market success, the new crime writers have freed themselves from the restrictive and derogatory ‘giallo’ label of low-brow genre – in fact they have questioned both the concept of genre in itself and the distinction between low-brow and high-brow literature – and adopted detective fiction as a form of social critique, a tool to explore and expose the dysfunctions of contemporary Italian society. More generally, contemporary Italian crime fiction is linked to the genre of Mediterranean noir, and on the home front it is interacting with other artistic means, including cinema, theatre and television, in the creation of a publicly and politically committed culture, a phenomenon recently termed ‘postmodern impegno’ (Antonello and Mussgnug, 2009). The crime novel, together with the ‘film-inchiesta’, the television inquiries of Blu note and the ‘teatro di narrazione’, looks back at some unresolved historical traumas of Italy’s recent past and offers readings that are officially or publicly impossible. Several conferences have been organized on Italian crime fiction and important studies have been published in Italy. The number of special issues of academic journals and ongoing initiatives such as ‘Roma Noir’ at the Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’ also testify to the great interest in the topic. With Italian Crime Fiction a comprehensive volume of excellent and thorough contributions is now also available in English.
This volume has several valuable merits. First of all, it puts the phenomenon of Italian crime fiction into its historical context. In Chapter 2 Jane Dunnett retraces the popularity of the crime fiction genre in the first decades of the twentieth century (a phenomenon confirmed by the launch in 1929 of Mondadori’s famous series ‘I Libri Gialli’). Her very useful survey of the publishing market shows that crime fiction circulated primarily in translation, but then, in spite of the restrictions imposed by the fascist censorship, a home-grown detective novel started to emerge with the works of Varaldo, D’Errico, De Angelis and Scerbanenco. Chapter 3, by Jennifer Burns, focuses on Giorgio Scerbanenco, and in particular on the series featuring Duca Lamberti written in the 1960s, which cemented his reputation as giallista. Scerbanenco is seen as the founding father of the Italian giallo because in his novels – as Burns explains with extreme clarity – we find encapsulated some of the hallmarks of contemporary Italian crime fiction, including the strong emphasis on environment (Milan functions ‘not merely as a backdrop but genuinely as the habitat which engenders, nurtures and occasionally overmasters the criminals and their crimes’, p. 32) and the use of the genre as a form of social commentary. Chapter 4, by Joseph Farrell, addresses the question of contamination between high and low literature which, thanks to the original narrative experimentation of writers of the calibre of Gadda, Eco, Tabucchi and Sciascia, distinguishes the Italian giallo. Farrell explores how these authors have used, parodied, challenged and also paid homage to the conventions of the crime genre. The detection becomes the parameter through which reality is probed: as Farrell notes, with these writers the ‘genre deals not only with crime and society, but can provide a forum for discussing death and meaning’ (p. 52). The literary gialli of Gadda, Eco, Tabucchi and Sciascia have not only managed to give a respected place to a low-brow genre in the canon of Italian writing, but have also provided some outstanding models for contemporary crime fiction writers.
The second great merit of the volume is to have identified and spelled out the features that distinguish crime fiction ‘made in Italy’: namely its polycentric nature, a consequence of its strong emphasis on local environment, and its social and political commitment. These two features are explored in Luca Somigli’s analysis of the ‘Bologna school’ of detective fiction (Chapter 5), from Loriano’s Macchiavelli’s murder mysteries of the 1970s, which deal with the aftermath of political terrorism, to Carlo Lucarelli, who is seen as the ‘caposcuola of the new vision of the genre as a form of socially engaged fiction’ (p. 80). The local identity and the idea of a ‘committed writing’ also inform Chapter 6 in which Mark Chu examines the works of three very successful contemporary southern Italian crime writers. Chu points out that the representation of a regional identity – Sicily for Camilleri, Sardinia for Fois and Bari for Carofiglio – ‘serves as a medium for the critique – originating from a variety of ethical or moral stances – of a particular social (dis)order, which may subsequently be extended to a more general commentary on Italian society’ (p. 89). In Chapter 7 the gender issue is brought to the fore. What emerges from Giuliana Pieri and Lucia Rinaldi’s examination – which, it must be underlined, skilfully avoids pigeonholing women crime writers as being somehow distinct from their male counterparts – is the particular focus on marginal and marginalized characters, as well as a merciless criticism of the institution of the family. The final chapter returns to the special focus that crime fiction, and particularly Italian crime fiction, places on the local environment and specifically on the urban setting. Pieri considers the prominent position occupied by Milan in the Italian noir, particularly in the 1990s during the aftermath of the Tangentopoli scandals, which took place in the city but affected all of Italy. Pieri convincingly argues that successive generations of crime writers, from Scerbanenco to Dazieri and Blondillo, ‘have transformed the city into a more complex metaphor for the changing Italy’ (p. 133). What interests Pieri is the dialectic between centre and periphery, which in contemporary detective narrative, for example that of Dazieri and Blondillo, has changed direction ‘showing signs of a new acceptance and understanding of the new ways of urban life which are being fostered by the peripheries’ (p. 142).
A final noteworthy feature of this volume is its highly readable style which makes it suitable for non-academics interested in the Italian noir as well as for scholars of Italian literature. The language is clear and exact; the essays are compact, dense and accompanied by a detailed critical apparatus and a sample page translated into English from some of the crime writers examined. Additionally the volume has an excellent annotated bibliography by Lucia Rinaldi. I find it remarkable that this slender book is so comprehensive in its coverage of the different aspects that characterize the phenomenon of contemporary Italian crime fiction. The volume is not simply a collection of essays on the topic but stands out as a carefully planned and well-thought-out project, edited by Giuliana Pieri with an excellent team of contributors.