Italian Noir: The Story of Italian Crime Fiction Timeshift

Italy.

Enchanting and beautiful home to historic architecture,

art and fashion.

But there's a dark heart to this tourist dream.

Italy is also a society of organised crime,

corruption and unsolved murders.

Out of this chilling reality,

a new wave of crime fiction has emerged...

..with its own twist on the conventions of the detective novel.

Unlike the Scandinavians,

you follow what I would term the British and American tradition fairly closely.

Murder, puzzle, psychology.

The Italians, their books are much more relevant to the world we live in.

It's a no-nonsense,

no-frills

crime thriller, which is absolutely in your face.

It's a world where everyone is a suspect.

In a society where no-one can be trusted,

Italian crime writers take an almost philosophical delight

in telling stories that offer no simple resolutions.

We write more noir in Italy than traditional thriller.

That's because we are more pessimistic than you about human nature.

A noir world with no happy endings.

The detective novels of Andrea Camilleri

are set in contemporary Sicily.

They deal with the casebook of the worldly Inspector Montalbano of the local police force.

I absolutely adore Inspector Montalbano.

I think the character is, in many ways, a kind of stereotypical view

of an Italian and perhaps also of a Sicilian man.

In the TV version of the books,

Montalbano's liking for long lunches becomes his trademark.

He's frequently shown at his favourite restaurant

where the waiters are left in no doubt about his passion for food.

He has an incredible interest in the whole culture and identity

of Sicily, particularly shown through his love of food.

Montalbano is as enthusiastic when forensically inspecting a menu

as he is searching for clues to a crime.

"Bring me a generous serving of the hake.

Camilleri armed Montalbano with a dry sense of humour.

Like all Sicilian policemen, Montalbano has to face the Mafia.

But Camilleri handles this confrontation in a surprising way.

The Mafia is so deeply implicated into the structure of Sicilian and Italian society,

that if it disappeared, a lot of it would actually crumble.

It's the cement that glues some of the bricks together.

Until they can find a substitute, they have to be there.

In a community where no-one can be relied on,

Camilleri's stories are a web of intrigue.

where nothing is ever as it seems.

In this scene from the television series, Montalbano arrives

to investigate an alleged kidnapping and recognises immediately

that there are many layers to the case.

The television series portrays Montalbano's encounters

with the Mafia in a very particular way.

It as if he's dealing not with a criminal organisation,

but with local bureaucrats,

a tone he maintains no matter how long the conversation.

Camilleri rejects the Hollywood version of the Mafia,

refusing to put them centre stage in his stories.

Instead, Camilleri chooses to focus on Montalbano's commitment to the law.

He is someone who really has a very strong sense of justice.

He will pursue something because he wants to get to the truth.

Montalbano's image may be laid back, but his methods are not.

Here he conducts a classic interview.

Where Montalbano is different from most other Italian coppers

is that he isn't judgemental.

He takes on the chin whatever he hears.

He might be judgemental in terms of his own feelings

that he doesn't necessarily need to show to people,

but he remains this cool, rational presence...

A bit Holmesian, if you like.

Where the intellect takes over,

although he's a very physical man - he's concerned with food, sex...

Those are elements of his life.

But he's still just basically a rational intelligence that works on problems.

It's conveyed by Camilleri that people talk to him and they trust him.

He gets results that way - more that way then by browbeating people.

But faced with a corrupt society,

Montalbano is rarely able actually to solve a crime...

And this sets him apart from the traditional fictional detective.

The lack of a resolution in the Inspector Montalbano stories

can trace its roots back to a novel set in Rome in 1927...

..during Mussolini's fascist regime.

In That Awful Mess On The Via Merulana,

Carlo Emilio Gadda employed a crime story to explore Italy's fascist era.

He's using the tropes of crime fiction - the burglary, the murder and the ensuing investigation -

more as a way of examining society

and what has caused the state of affairs,

the fascist state in Italian society.

That Awful Mess On The Via Merulana begins with the murder of a woman

in an upmarket Rome apartment.

"The body of the poor signora was lying in an infamous position

"a deep, a terrible red cut opened her throat fiercely.

"It had taken half the neck from the front towards the right,

"that is towards her left, the right to those who were looking down."

But Gadda shows how pointless it is to investigate

a single crime when the society that surrounds it is so corrupt.

Gadda's story subtly reveals the way fascism penetrated the lives of ordinary Italians.

It is an extremely critical view of the regime, particularly because

one of the things, to me, is very interesting in novel is the way

in which the main female character represents what Italian women

were facing during the fascist years.

It's clearly a very patriarchal society.

Lilliana can't have children so she has all these fairly ambiguous,

complex relationships with other young women, they are adopted by her.

The whole crime revolves around that.

She has been murdered and we need to find out who murdered her.

Gadda was an established literary figure who delivered his anti-fascist message

in a distinctive style that mixed local dialects and slang to satirise Italy's dictator.

Gadda, when he talks about Mussolini,

he is satirical of his performances,

his penchant for particular uniforms.

His macho posturing. There's a series of name-calling that goes on.

Here Gadda mocks Mussolini in a way Italian readers would have instantly recognised.

I think he was attempting to do something which really hadn't been done before.

Obviously, the closest parallel is Joyce.

The time we spend in Rome is like the time we spend in Dublin with Joyce.

It's astonishingly very panoply,

this picture of an entire society.

It uses, like Joyce, a variety of different styles.

It uses a straightforward, academic style, it uses popular vernacular -

it just throws everything in.

"In front of the big louse coloured building a crowd circumfused...

"..Protected an odd job man also in an apron, striped,

"his nose the shape and colour of a wondrous pepper...

"..concierges, the maids, the little daughters of the concierges."

What you have is a detective story, but it's almost a sort of playing

with the conventions of the detective story.

You have a particular kind of inspector,

a particular kind of investigation -

one that's ultimately open-ended and unresolved.

It seems to be that this is an inquiry into the nature

of reality and the way in which one can know reality.

So every type of inquiry leads to a new set of possibilities.

So you can never really get to know and understand reality fully.

The kind of suggestion is that what fascism is really doing is imposing

a series of infantile simplifications on the complexity of reality.

By setting his detective novel in the fascist era,

Gadda became the first writer to use the crime story

as a way of looking at Italian history.

I've always thought that Gadda was one of the very first writers

that makes the link between crime fiction and Italian history very clear.

That will become almost like a blueprint for later writers.

After Mussolini's fascist dictatorship ended with Italy's defeat in the Second World War,

a writer from Sicily began gathering material

for crime stories which would challenge another sinister force

that came to dominate post-war Italy.

Into the 1960s, Leonardo Sciascia's novels

would expose the power of the Sicilian Mafia.

The Mafia had emerged as powerful players in Italian society

during the US occupation in the immediate post-war years.

Leonardo Sciascia's 1961 novel The Day Of The Owl told the story

of a police detective's battle to solve the murder of a local businessman.

At every turn, his investigations are hampered by murky Mafia forces.

It's a novel in which you really get a sense of how deeply embedded

the Mafia is in Sicilian society.

Not just simply from the point of view of the economics but from the point of view of the culture

and the reign of terror that, in a sense, gripped Sicily

has influenced the way in which Sicilians live their lives,

the social cohesion of communities.

The whole idea of not being able to speak freely,

the sense of distrust that people have.

On a personal level, the difficult relationship that people have

with each other all based on the fact that you cannot trust anybody.

"Two ear-splitting shots rang out."

The beginning of the novel, in which someone gets shot by the Mafia

and no-one has seen or heard

anything, is really emblematic of that.

"Nobody on the bus saw a thing.

"It was a hell of a job to find out who was on the bus.

"The passengers said the windows were so steamy they looked like frosted glass.

"Maybe true."

No-one has seen anything.

You don't want to be involved, it's far too dangerous to be involved.

You do know in Sicily, or you knew at the time, that you didn't have...

The police wouldn't come to help. The state was not there for you.

And that, I think, instigates a mechanism of self-preservation.

You pretend nothing has happened.

You don't want to know, you haven't seen, you haven't heard.

You mind your own business.

You lead your life in a very closed world.

Sciascia doesn't consider himself to be a crime writer.

He's looking at society.

And particularly Sciascia, as opposed to maybe Gadda or others,

what's important for him is not just Sicily but also the landscape,

the colours, the smells of Sicily,

which I think come through incredibly well in his writing.

"Dawn was infusing the countryside.

"It seemed to rise from the tender green wheat,

"from the rocks and dripping trees

"and mount imperceptibly towards a blank sky.

The Gramole, incongruous in green uplands...

Sicily IS different.

You get off the boat or the plane and you feel you're in a different country in some cases.

It's a bit like, if you understand French, if you go to Quebec.

You almost don't understand the language.

The Sicilians are very proud to have seceded, so to speak, from Italy,

not only geographically but also, I think, mentally.

It's a different atmosphere altogether, and there's a certain pride of place.

Like Gadda, Sciascia chose to reject the conventional model of detective fiction.

Instead, his investigator, Inspector Bellodi, is forced

to confront the corruption that exists in the society around him.

In Day Of The Owl, the interesting thing is the protagonist, who goes on a journey of discovery.

It's an education for him.

He has to learn the realpolitik of the way things get done and the way things don't get done.

And that book, more than many Italian crime books, has all-encapsulated the fact

that you learn who committed the crime, but there isn't necessarily closure.

And we really want that, readers want that.

But the great Italian crime writers don't give you that.

They say, "OK, you know who committed the crime.

"But this is the real word, and criminals go unpunished."

By the late 1960s, Sciascia began to inject political intrigue into

his stories as a way of talking about the rise of terrorism in Italy.

An era that would become known as the Years of Lead.

The Years of Lead starts from December 1969,

when a bomb is planted in a bag in central Milan, in Piazza Fontana.

There's a real sense, at the time, of great discontent.

This neo-fascist bombing began a decade of terror,

with bloody attacks launched by both right and left-wing extremists.

Sciascia now took on Italian politics.

In 1971, he wrote Equal Danger, a tense crime thriller

about the murder, one by one, of some of the country's top judges.

"Never had prosecutors or judges been threatened,

"or struck down for a position taken during a trial,

"or for a verdict delivered."

In Equal Danger, there is a plot to blame the murders on left-wing extremists.

Sciascia takes on both the left and the right.

So, he's instructed to pin the crime on the left.

But it's not that simple.

But you would think, "Oh, yes, OK, that means he's a writer of the left.

"Therefore, the left will be idealised." No, they're not.

They're shown as disinterested, they have fashionable left-wing causes which they take up.

It's quite a nuanced view of Italian society.

Maybe typical, in many ways, of a lot of Italians who do have

ambiguous views about political dimensions.

We have a period of great social unrest, political uncertainty.

A sense in which no-one knew whether the enemy

came from within the state or from outside.

Through the 1970s, Italy was torn apart by a series of violent terrorist attacks.

In total in that period, we have 14,000 terrorist attacks,

374 people are killed

and 1,170 are wounded.

In 1978, the kidnapping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro troubled Italians.

Was Moro killed by the Marxist militant group the Red Brigades

or by sinister forces connected to the government?

The conspiracy theories surrounding the execution of Moro

prompted Leonardo Sciascia to write his own investigation.

In The Moro Affair, Sciascia drew his reader's attention

to inconsistencies in the official version of events.

It all contributed to an atmosphere of political turmoil,

in which there were frequent miscarriages of justice.

The victim of one famous case would write crime stories which drew on his experience of the Years of Lead.

In 1976, Massimo Carlotto was a student and left-wing activist

who was framed for a murder he didn't commit.

After being sentenced to 15 years in prison,

Carlotto fled Italy, first for Paris and then to Central America.

He was returned to an Italian prison after five years on the run

and began an extraordinary legal battle to clear his name.

Eventually pardoned, Carlotto was released in 1993.

This experience led him to write The Fugitive,

which became a best-selling novel.

"I was a classic accidental fugitive, someone who never expected to have

"problems with the law, who never thought he would need to

"invent an escape from his own country as the one way to save his own life,

"his freedom and his dignity."

The Fugitive inspired a film about Carlotto's years on the run.

This graphic scene leaves the audience in no doubt about how tough it was for him.

He was tortured at the hands of the Mexican police after he was captured.

Carlotto is a kind of special case because obviously he's a man

who knows from first hand about miscarriages of justice.

It's amazing really, if you think about it, what he went through

in terms of the accusations and the time he spent on the run

and so forth before he became a writer.

The ending of that in Britain might have been a ghost writer coming in,

so the celeb writes a disposable book that's thrown away

that tells a story, everybody reads it, and its serialised in the papers.

He actually turned into a very good writer.

Carlotto has gone on to write violent crime fiction set in contemporary Italy,

drawn from his experience of being in the country's toughest prisons.

Carlotto's rough justice shaped the raw writing style of his novels.

He was influenced by the political tone of Leonardo Sciascia

but he added a new level of brutality of his own

to stories like The Goodbye Kiss.

It's a no-nonsense, no-frills crime thriller

which is absolutely in your face and doesn't deal with subtleties,

but Italian readers and British readers who have encountered him

know exactly where they are with him.

The book's kind of like a bucket of cold water being thrown in the face.

His books basically look at white slavery, drugs, prostitution.

I mean, there's nothing easy or cosy about his books.

For The Goodbye Kiss,

Carlotto rejected the convention of an investigating detective.

He inverted this tradition by creating an amoral, violent former terrorist as the lead character.

The darkly shot opening scene from the film of The Goodbye Kiss

sets up this figure perfectly,

as he coldly shoots one of his own men in the back of the head.

The Goodbye Kiss is filmed as a modern day noir.

In this world, killings are at once realistic and stylised.

The male characters are real, sort of, macho, strong, aggressive.

And this is not simply because Carlotto is using a particular genre

in which traditionally male characters are depicted in a certain way.

There's something more to that.

When you look at the way in which women are represented in the novels, they are very marginal.

Carlotto's time spent with hardened criminals

shaped the hardcore misogynistic actions of his lead characters.

I don't think Carlotto does understand women.

He sees them basically as pawns in terrible games,

which is probably why there is so much violence against women.

And these women seldom fight back.

I think he is the kind of writer who says, "I'm sorry, this is it.

"I'm not going to varnish things. This is the way people behave."

There's no sentimentality. This kind of a small amount of human feeling.

In fact, when you read a Carlotto book, you're trying to search out that bit of human feeling

cos you wanted and you grab it, and you're really grateful for it. He's not dealing with that.

Carlotto's version of realism is motivated by a desire to bring what he regards

as a more journalistic approach than seen in Anglo-American crime fiction.

Carlotto's first-hand experience of Italy's violent underworld

has heralded a new wave of Italian writers who base their novels on real characters.

From the other side of the law,

a top Roman judge has dipped into his casebook to write an explosive novel

set in the Italian capital about the city's notorious gangsters.

Giancarlo De Cataldo's debut novel, Romanzo Criminale,

was inspired by his work as an investigating judge,

a role that took him to both crime scenes and prisons.

Being a judge helps me to go in some places where writers long for going all their lives.

Like houses where people have been killed.

And so that's a chance. If you are talented as a writer,

if you have these gifts, you must use it.

It would be a crime not to use it.

Cataldo's training as a judge and his activity as a judge

I think is important, not only because it gives him

visibility, it gave visibility to his books at the beginning and it attracted additional interest.

But also because it informs his way of writing.

De Cataldo based his story on a real criminal street gang, the Banda della Magliana.

I studied the phenomenon of Banda della Magliana, which was a gang organisation

for people coming from the suburbs of Rome that became a real criminal power

collecting money and imposing a kind of law,

as if Mafia for the first time had taken place in Rome.

I first met one of those people from the gang, he was repented,

he was under protection of justice.

But those judges didn't believe him.

So he was set free and then murdered.

The second occasion, the second chance was working in a trial against

some of the members of these gangs, the survivors,

because many of them had died.

They were real criminals, but they were old-style criminals at the same time.

Set over more than a decade, De Cataldo's novel

imagines how these gangsters may have been involved

in the darkest chapters of The Years of Lead,

an era that continues to intrigue Italians.

One of the achievements of Romanzo Criminale is to fold in

the real life events that he talks about in a kind of responsible way.

I mean, it's a long tradition.

Tolstoy put Napoleon in War and Peace.

So it's been happening for quite a long time to put real events in.

In 2005, these real events were brought to the cinema screen,

when Romanzo Criminale was adapted

into a stylish gangster epic, dubbed the Italian Goodfellas.

A pivotal scene from the film deliberately mixes real life news reports of the kidnapping

of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro with the action, reflecting the twin focus of the book.

I think the novel wants to inform readers.

I think the novel wants to convey historical facts.

And certainly wants to convey a particular idea of historical facts as well.

De Cataldo also explores the bloodiest event

from The Years of Lead, which took place at Bologna train station in August, 1980.

In a dramatic scene from the film,

gang member Ice finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The fictional character being placed within this

environment allows us to indulge what might have taken place.

We see Ice arriving at the station.

The clock says 10:23. We know at 10:25 the bomb has to go off.

And to see him emerging from the station with the bomb going off behind him...

..and then walking in the rubble of

what is an incredibly effective reconstruction of the events,

is extremely disturbing.

And I think that scene brings us into the heart of the Bologna bombing.

It puts us there among the dead.

I mean, the shots of children are incredibly chilling.

And it brings home to us as well that this is not

just a fun gangster movie, but that there is a very sinister side to it.

The movie is far different from the book, because in the book,

we had no real link in a comparison

between the gang and the Bologna massacre.

The movie is far different.

But what I wanted to mark was that are part of Italian history

was criminal history, and that there's a grey zone

between the normal citizen,

the power, the legal economy, and the underworld.

And that is why Romanzo Criminale is more than a thriller.

A historical and political crime novel.

The location of this bombing was significant.

Bologna, a university city, was known as Red Bologna,

in part due its reputation as a centre of left-wing politics.

And today, this politically radical city has inspired

a young female author to write a crime story

which confronts the rise of sexual violence against women.

In 2010, Barbara Baraldi's novel The Girl With The Crystal Eyes

introduced a new character into Italian crime fiction.

The female vigilante.

"Her quick, small fingers pick up a rose.

"But it's not the rose's thorns that pierce the man's flesh,

"but a kitchen knife, sharp and shining

"that enters deep into his chest and then slides out again,

"spurting hot, dark, dense drops of blood

"that splash the perfect features of her face."

I think you'd have to say a writer like Baraldi has a cinematic sensibility.

She deals in a kind of visual language, even though its words

on a page, which she knows readers will quickly relate to.

So there is the literary equivalent of fast cutting, and cutting between scenes.

And there's a minimum of exposition.

There's a minimum of explanation.

Cos she thinks, my readership will be able to keep up with me, and if they don't, too bad.

They're going to have to struggle initially, but it will be worth it in the end.

So she's of a generation where film has informed her writing as much as anything she's read.

Baraldi found inspiration for her horror writing style

from literary classics familiar to British readers.

"She takes a last look in the gilded mirror,

"a mirror that wouldn't be out of place in a fairy tale,

"a fairytale that's frightening but where she's the fairest of them all,

"beautiful just as she is, smelling of blood."

They're almost like dark, nasty, black fairy tales.

And in various respects, she is quite unique.

Barbara Baraldi has to make her mark in maybe a society that doesn't have the most enlightened views of women.

So there are various ways to go.

She went in the way that is kind of a rebellious, punkish way.

She's probably aiming at younger readership.

And you wouldn't read one of her books if you were squeamish

of easily shocked, because you'd put it down very quickly.

It's taken a long time for the women to come out and Barbara Baraldi is one. But you have other writers.

You've got Francesca Mazzucato, and a mad writer called Isabella Santacroce,

who does incredible public events,

and whose books are almost like, Lewis Carroll goes psycho.

The women, rather than bringing a sort of softer, cosy version of it, which, for instance a lot of

British and American female writers do, it is a bit cosy, a bit too convenient,

like the traditional Miss Marple.

Although, obviously, some, Rendell are very dark for a psychological point of view.

But the new Italian women writers bring a feminine touch,

but a feminine touch which is actually quite bloody.

And proves an absolutely fascinating contrast with their male counterparts.

A contemporary of Baraldi's is another Bologna writer, who has brought

a journalistic rigour to the genre to become the most high profile and successful writer of Italian noir.

Carlo Lucarelli is the celebrity face of Italian crime fiction,

even presenting a hugely popular TV show

where he casts himself as the lead investigator into real crimes.

He has a very peculiar interest in setting himself up

as an investigative journalist-cum-historian-cum-writer.

He wants to combine all three aspects.

He applied his extraordinary method when researching the character

of a serial killer in his best-selling novel, Almost Blue.

"Sometimes my shadow is darker than other people's.

"I've seen it sometimes when I'm walking along the street.

"It stains the wall alongside me.

"Sometimes I get scared that someone will notice it

"but I can't run away from it because it would follow me,

"it would spread out stickily and black alongside me.

"That's why I stay close to the wall."

We are inside a psychotic mind.

That is more important than in the world that we see in some of the other Italian crime writers.

That informs everything. So everything is paranoid,

everything is strange, schizophrenic and disturbing.

It was the first Italian crime fiction book which, in my opinion,

actually integrated perfectly the best of English and American hard-boiled crime fiction elements.

And brought them alive within an Italian context.

Lucarelli also used intensive research to dig up his country's

troubled past for Carte Blanche,

a novel set during the final months of Italy's fascist regime.

Lucarelli was frustrated at Italy's failure to properly investigate the fascist period.

To research Carte Blanche, Lucarelli tracked down a former policeman

who had served in the fascist police.

What shocked Lucarelli was that after the war,

this fascist officer was allowed to continue as a policeman in Italy's post-war democracy.

Lucarelli's interviews with the policeman would form the basis

for the character of Commissioner De Luca in Carte Blanche.

He would go on to feature in a further two novels,

to form a period crime trilogy.

By tackling Italy's painful history and embracing the lack of any certain resolution,

Lucarelli can trace his method back to the roots of Italian noir.

He identifies in his fellow writers a shared commitment to write more than simple crime stories.

This is the authentic voice of Italian noir.

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