JOST A MON

The  town of Bologna has given rise to another crime writer, one who brings a journalistic rigour to his fiction. This is Carlo Lucarelli, the most successful and high-profile author of Italian noir, is famous as the star of a TV show where he casts himself as a lead investigator of real crimes. He aims to combine in his writing the best of investigative journalism, history and fiction. Nowhere is this extraordinary methodology more evident than in his researches into a serial killer for his best-selling novel Almost Blue.

“I went to a psychiatrist,” he says, “and told him: ‘suppose that my character were sitting here, his name is Alessio Crotti, he comes from Cadoneghe in the Padua province…’ That place has nothing to do with the serial killer, but I once went there to present a book and got lost… I wanted to punish the place by making it the birthplace of my serial killer. ‘He hears bells ring and kills people. Why?’

“And we carried out a real psychiatric test on a fictional character. The psychiatrist began by asking, ‘Where does he come from?’ ‘Cadoneghe.’ ‘What kind of place is it?’ ‘Who are his parents?’ And this gave life and a voice to my serial killer.”

Sometimes my shadow is darker than other people's. I’ve seen it sometimes when I am 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, sticky and black, alongside me. That’s why I stay close to the wall.

The reader is inside a psychotic mind. That is more important than in the world we see of some other Italian crime writers, that informs everything. Everything is paranoid, everything is strange, schizophrenic and disturbing. It is the first Italian crime novel (says Maxim Jakubowski) that perfectly integrated the best of English and American hard-boiled noir elements and brought them to life in an Italian context.

Lucarelli also impressively researched Italian history of the Fascist era for Carte Blanche, set in the final months of that regime. He was frustrated by his country’s inability to investigate the Mussolini period. “It is where you find the roots of the many contradictions and problems we have today,” says Lucarelli. “The failure to overcome fascism, what happened after the end of the Second World War, a number of important things…”

He tracked down a former policeman who had served in the Fascist period. “I went to interview a policeman,” he says. “He had been a member of the political police from 1941 to 1981, forty years. I remember how he told me that at the beginning, he was a member of Mussolini’s political police, and he used to arrest anti-fascists and communists.” What shocked Lucarelli was that this Fascist officer had been allowed to continue as a policeman in the post-war Italian democracy.

“You, a Fascist, in the police force? ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I was a good policeman, there was a need for social order…’ He found himself arresting the fascists who had been his previous employers.”

These interviews would form the basis of the character of Commissioner De Luca in Carte Blanche, who would go on to feature in a further two novels, to form a period crime trilogy. “I felt,” says Lucarelli, “that De Luca with all his contradictions is on the one hand a good person, a policeman, a detective, the man who, in the crime novel, will lead us to the truth. Yet at the same time he is also the instrument of dictatorships and so on. So he is a man full of contradictions who can live through Italian history and tell us about the contradictions of each period. This is why I have kept him alive for three novels and why I am now thinking of a fourth.”

By tackling Italy’s painful history, and embracing the lack of any certain resolution, Lucarelli can trace his methods back to the roots of Italian noir. He identifies in his fellow writers a shared commitment to write more than just simple crime stories. “We belong to a literary style that prefers to tell a story rather than describe a scene. Our detectives are all characters who see what is happening in society and suffer. They understand that there is nothing they can do about it and this brings a state of despair.”

This is the authentic voice of Italian noir.

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction.]

The  location of the terrorist attack of August 1980 was significant. Bologna, a rich and intellectual town, has often been called ‘Red Bologna’ for its reputation as a centre of leftist politics. And today this politically radical city has inspired a young female author to write a crime novel that profiles the rise of sexual violence against women.

In 2010, Barbara Baraldi’s The Girl with the Crystal Eyes introduced a new character into the Italian crime novel – the female vigilante. “[It] originated from a scene I had in my mind of a woman who killed,” says Baraldi, “who killed a man but more than one man, and therefore there arises an important question - ‘what in this day and age brings a woman to kill someone?’”

She removes her magic wand from the top of her hold-up stockings and caresses his throat. He hasn’t time to scream. The artery in his neck has been sliced open with a small bronze razor that looks like a prop from some old film. The blood sprays everywhere, staining the filthy walls.

It covers her.

It colours her.

“In Italy, very often sex crimes remain unpunished,” says Baraldi, “in the sense that men are released immediately, and therefore I thought about creating this provocative character of a woman vigilante who roams the city of Bologna at night which was considered once a calm city, a university city; but in reality it hides a dark side. And this vigilante dresses provocatively and when she is attacked, she kills. She only kills men with bad intentions.

“Certainly current stories in the news affect my novel because when I wrote it, there was an explosion in crimes – almost all of a sexual nature. I remember the most serious one, however, was treated quite lightly: a girl in broad daylight at the bus stop was dragged into the nearest park and raped. So in broad daylight, a young student… I mean, I was very angry when faced with all these things.”

They start laughing.

Crack.

Crack.

Two pistol shots.

Two bodies lying on their backs. The blood of one merges with the blood of the other in a macabre dance of bodily fluids.

Baraldi’s writing has a cinematic quality to it that readers can quickly relate to at once. She employs the literary equivalent of fast cutting and cutting between scenes to dramatic effect. There is a  minimum of exposition, a minimum of explanation, as though she dares the reader to keep up with her. The reader may struggle initially, but it will be worth it in the end. Baraldi is of the generation where film has informed her writing as much as anything she has read.

She found her horror writing style from literary classics familiar to British readers. “Lately I have been dubbed an exponent of new Italian Goth,” says Baraldi. “I grew up with romanticism, and with mystery, and I’m passionate about Mary Shelley, and the atmosphere of Dracula.”

“When I was a child,” she continues, “I read fairy tales. What struck me was the fact that these were actually rather violent fairy tales being told: the Wicked Witch, or Bluebeard who hanged his wives in a room you could not enter without staining the key with blood.”

She takes the hairpin from her hair and drives it into his eye, punching through to the brain.

Barbara Baraldi has to make her way in a society that is not entirely propitious to women. There were several avenues of protest open to her, and she chose a rebellious, punkish mode. She has attracted a younger readership, one that is not easily shocked or squeamish. She is one among several female Italian crime writers, a set of women who do not write cosy novels of the Miss Marple genre. The books of the new Italian women are bloody and edgy, and a wonderful opposition to their contemporary male counterparts.

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction.]

Massimo Carlotto’s first-hand experiences 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 investigative magistrate in Rome, a role that took him both to crime scenes and prisons. Writers long for the sort of access he has, he says. If one is talented as a writer and has inside knowledge, it is a crime not to put it to use.  He based his novel on a real street gang, the Banda della Magliana, a suburban gang that became a real criminal power in the city, “collecting money and imposing a kind of law as if the Mafia had for the first time, taken place in Rome.”

“I first met one of those people from the gang,” said de Cataldo, “he was a repented, he was under protection of justice, but those judges didn’t believe him, so he was set free and then murdered. The second chance was working in a trial against some of the members of these gangs, the survivors, because many of them were dead. They were real criminals, but they were old style criminals at the same time.” Set over a period of a decade, de Cataldo imagines that these people were involved in the darkest parts of the Years of Lead, a time that continues to intrigue Italians to this day.

One of the achievements of Romanzo Criminale is to fold in the lives of real people into the events de Cataldo describes in a responsible way.  In 2005, a cinematic treatment with hip characters was released, dubbed the Italian Goodfellas. A pivotal moment in the film deftly flicks between real newsreel coverage of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro and the action of the book, reflecting the twin focus of the book.

De Cataldo also explores the bloodiest event from the Years of Lead, which took place at Bologna railway station in August 1980. In a dramatic moment in the film, a gang member Ice finds himself at the wrong place at the wrong time. A fictional character placed in that situation allows the reader to be involved in what might have occurred at the time. Ice arrives at the station at 10:23, and we know that at 10:25 the bomb has to go off. The explosion behind him is an effective reconstruction of the events, extremely disturbing, bringing us directly into the heart of the Bologna bombing, putting us there among the dead, showing us this is not just a fun gangster film.

De Cataldo explains that the film is different from the book, in that there is no coincidence between the gang and the bombing in the book. However, he adds, he wanted to emphasise that much of Italian history is criminal history, and there is a deep link between the lives of the ‘normal’ citizen and offices of the state, and the underworld. “And that is why Romanzo Criminale is more than a thriller – it is a historical and political crime novel.”

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction.]

One of the victims of the Years of Lead would write stories that drew upon his experience of the time. In 1976, Massimo Carlotto was a left-wing activist who found a severely injured person and reported it. As a member of a militant organisation, he was implicated, arraigned and condemned by a right-wing judiciary as a murderer. Seeing no salvation for himself in Italy, he fled to Paris and then to Central America, remaining on the run for five years. He faced torture in Mexico and was returned to Italy where he began an extraordinary legal battle prove himself innocent. It was a poignant, deeply disturbing story of corruption and miscarriage of justice.

Eventually pardoned and released in 1993, Carlotto, the most prosecuted man in Italy for a single crime, decided to write a book of his experiences. The Fugitive became a best-selling novel. He then went on to write violent crime fiction set in contemporary Italy. Having been in one of the toughest prisons in Italy, he gained an insight into the criminal demi-monde. “It was very useful for my profession because I met a lot of seedy people with whom to this day I keep in touch,” he said. “They supply me with a lot of information, useful for my novels.” Carlotto’s run ins with the law shaped the cruel terseness of his writings.

Carlotto was influenced by the political shades of Leonardo Sciascia, but he went on to add a brutality all his own in stories such as The Goodbye Kiss. His books look at white slavery, prostitution, drugs; there’s nothing cosy or easy about them. He subverted the tradition of a detective by introducing an amoral, violent terrorist as a lead character. “Giorgio Pellegrini, the character in The Goodbye Kiss, was the first character in Italian crime fiction to be not only an anti-hero but a ruthless one at that,” Carlotto said. “He is extremely true to life.”

The killings in Carlotto’s stories are realistic and highly stylised. His male characters are macho, ruthless, aggressive. They are singular in their misogyny, much more than one would expect from a typical hard-boiled protagonist. Women in his novels are marginal, hapless victims, pawns in the men’s terrible games. There is much violence against them and yet they seldom fight back. “It allows us to describe and criticise reality,” Carlotto says. He wants to bring a more journalistic approach to his work than what he sees in Anglo-American crime writing. “No one does investigative journalism with respect to changes in criminal phenomena in Italy any more,” he declares. “No one writes about major crimes any more, especially organised crime. Anglo-American novelists have remained novelists, for us it has been necessary to become something more.”

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction]

In the period following the defeat of Italy in the Second World War, a young writer began gathering material for crime stories that would challenge another sinister force that would dominate the country. Into the 1960s, Leonardo Sciascia’s novels would expose the power of the Sicilian Mafia. The Mafia had become deeply entrenched in the country in the post-war period, during the occupation by US forces. Sciascia’s 1961 novel, The Day of the Owl, told the story of a detective’s battle to solve the murder of a local businessman. At every turn, his investigations are hampered by murky Mafia forces. It is a novel that reveals how deeply the Mafia has permeated Sicilian society, not just economically but also culturally, and how its reign of terror has changed the behaviour of the islanders. The social cohesion of communities is punctured by the fear to speak freely and the sense of distrust that weighs on them all.

The novel begins with a murder by the Mafia. Nobody has seen or heard anything, a denial emblematic of the corrosion in civic values in Sicily. 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 that the windows were so steamy that they looked like frosted glass. Maybe true.

Sciascia didn’t see himself as just a crime writer. He was a social commentator, but much more than Gadda, he was also deeply alive to the sense of Sicily, its landscape and its culture. His writing reflected that beautifully. Dawn was infusing the countryside. It seemed to rise from the tender green wheat, from the rocks and dripping trees that mount imperceptibly towards a blank sky. The Gramole, incongruous in green uplands, look like a huge black whole sponge soaking up the light flooding the landscape.

Like Gadda, Sciascia chose to reject the conventional model of detective fiction. Instead, his detective, Inspector Bellodi, is forced to confront the corruption that surrounds him. He is on a quest for knowledge very nearly like a spiritual warrior; he learns the limits of what he can do and, more importantly, what he can’t; even when he finds the criminal, he finds no closure. Readers of the crime genre crave a final resolution, but Sciascia, like the other great Italian writers, refuses to grant them that grace.

By the late 1960s, Sciascia began to inject political intrigue into his stories, mirroring the collusion of politics and terrorism and its bane upon Italian society. This was an era that came to be known as the Years of Lead. A bag containing explosives placed in a central piazza in Milan by neo-fascists in 1969 was the start of this era, a decade of carnage by both right and left wing terrorists. Sciascia took on politics, and in 1971, in Equal Danger, wrote about the murder, one by one, of some of the country’s top judges. In the book is a plot to blame the murders on left-wing extremists. You might think that such a plot would reveal Sciascia a leftist himself, but instead you would find nuance as Sciascia takes on both sides, following the delicate  undulations of the Italian everyman’s political opinion.

In the Years of Lead, 374 Italians were killed and 1,170 wounded, in a series of brutal attacks that tore the country apart. At the time, people could scarcely imagine whether the criminals were from within the state or without. In 1978 came the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, a former Prime Minister of the country. Was he killed by the Marxist militant group, the Red Brigades, or was he killed by sinister forces in the government? The popular speculations that troubled Italians about who were the culprits prompted Sciascia to conduct his own researches, which he published in The Moro Affair. He drew the reader’s attention to the discrepancies in the official version of events. It all contributed to an atmosphere of political turmoil in which there were frequent miscarriages of justice.

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction]

The lack of resolution in Inspector Montalbano’s casebooks owes its origins to a novel published in Rome in 1927. During Mussolini’s fascist regime, Carlo Emilio Gadda wrote That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, a crime story to explore the country’s fascist era. He uses the tropes of crime  fiction – the burglary, the murder, the ensuing investigation – as a way of examining society, and what has caused the fascist state in Italian society.

The book begins with the murder of an old woman in an upmarket Roman apartment. The body of the poor signora was lying in an infamous position. A deep, terrible red cut opened her throat fiercely… It had taken half the neck, from the front toward 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 society around it is itself so corrupt. The crime was the effect of a whole list of motives which had blown in on a whirlwind. The story revealed how subtly fascism had penetrated the lives of ordinary Italians. In a patriarchal society, one of the main female characters represented what Italian women faced in the Mussolini years. Liliana couldn’t have children, so she has ambiguous relationships with the young women of the apartment block who are ‘adopted’ by her, and these relationships form the swirl and colour of the crime.

Gadda was an established literary figure aiming his criticism at the fascist regime. He used colourful slang and local dialect to satirise Italy’s dictator. He pointed out Mussolini’s penchant for fancy uniforms, his posturing; there is a fair amount of name-calling that goes on. He mocked Mussolini in a way that Italian readers could recognise at once.

In his book, he is as wildly inventive and playful as James Joyce in The Dubliners. He uses terseness and academic text, digressions and word-play; he twists the convention of detective fiction to tell his larger story; his characters are types; his investigations are of a certain kind; his story is ultimately unresolved. The complexity of reality, he seems to say, are banally simplified by fascism.

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction]

Unlike the Scandinavians, that other major force in criminal fiction, who follow the Anglo-American tradition of the genre, murder, puzzle, psychology, the Italians write books that much more relevant to the world they live in. No-nonsense, no-frills, and based in a society where almost nobody can be trusted, they take particular delight in mysteries that can scarcely be resolved to anybody’s satisfaction. They write more noir than thrillers because they are more pessimistic about the world than the British or the Americans. They live in 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. He is a stereotypical Italian man, a staunch Sicilian, passionate. In the television series based on the novels, a long lunch is par for the course. He sits at a favoured location in his favoured restaurant, where the staff are in no doubt about his passion for food. A waiter brings out a dish for him. He makes appreciative noises as he is served. The waiter asks him if he’d like the fish at the table. ‘No,’ he replies. ‘Keep it warm for me.’

Montalbano is as enthusiastic when investigating the intricacies of a menu as he is searching for clues to a crime. “It is absolutely deliberate,” says Andrea Camilleri. “Highlighting how he loves to eat, to participate, how he loves life. There is a beautiful saying: ‘Primum vivere deinde filosofari.’ First you live, then you philosophise. For Montalbano it could be ‘First you live then you investigate.’”

Camilleri has imbued Montalbano with a dry wit.

‘My dear friends!’ said the lawyer upon entering the room. ‘Please don’t get up! Can I get you anything? I have whatever you want.’

‘No, thank you,’ said Minutolo.

‘Yes please, I’d like a daiquiri,’ said Montalbano.

The lawyer gave him a befuddled look.

Like all Sicilian policemen, Montalbano has to deal with the Mafia. Camilleri handles this confrontation in a surprising way. “In most of the Montalbano novels there is always a page or two where he meets a member of the Mafia,” says Camilleri. “But it is marginal. I would say this marginality is deliberate on my part. Not that I am trivialising the problem. Not mentioning it would be hypocritical. The problem exists and it is important.”

In a community where nobody can be relied on, Camilleri’s stories are a web of intrigue where nothing is ever as it seems. Montalbano often realises that underneath what appears to be a simple crime there are layers of meanings. In his dealings with the Mafia, he talks to them as though they are a bureaucratic organisation. Camilleri rejects the Hollywood treatment of the Mafia, refusing to put them centre-stage in his stories. “Fiction somehow gives them a noble character,” he avers. “Take for example The Godfather. Marlon Brando’s incredible performance makes us forget that he is someone ordering killings by the dozen. This is the risk that you run that in some way the Mafia is glamorised, and I won’t do that.” Instead, Camilleri chooses to focus on Montalbano’s commitment to the law. He  makes no judgments, he listens sympathetically, he is cool and rational in his investigation, and he is implacable in his hunt.

But faced with a corrupt society, Montalbano is rarely able actually to solve a crime. This sets him apart from the traditional detective of crime fiction. “In truth,” says Camilleri, “There are few cases that are resolved with definite certainty. In Italy there is no longer even the certitude of a punishment. So at this point the poor crime fiction writer begins to ask himself some questions. He says ‘do I really have to be the one to sew the torn fabric of society?’ Why do I have to do it? Why is this up to me? Is it fair for me to declare this person is guilty beyond reasonable doubt? Let us leave him with an alternative so it is difficult to reach an absolute truth. One could even question whether an absolute truth exists.”

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction]