Italian Detective Fiction in a European Context: National, International, Transnational

Abstract: Detective fiction and place have always been tightly connected, both within the fiction itself and within the criticism. In this article, I look at French, Scandinavian and Italian crime fiction, with an eye not only to what a comparative analysis shows (traditionally rooted in a relatively static notion of national literatures that are assumed to be more or less “comparable” and thus in some sense equivalent) but—more importantly—to what an analysis attentive to a transnational understanding shows. The notion of the international and the idea of comparative are remarkably close in locating themselves in an abstract space between two objects of attention. Those objects are, in their abstracted state, more or less equal. What is lost in those abstractions is precisely what is not lost in the space of the transnational, since transnational movements are always from one specific place to another. Transnational studies should always capture the question of the asymmetric and differential power between nations and cultures—what makes it easy to go to some places, hard to go to other. Broadly speaking, I look at two very different kinds of crime fiction. First, the international thriller, in which the detective moves effortlessly around the world, the movement of Bauman’s “liquid modernity”—a genre that is, unsurprisingly, strongly associated with an invisible privilege and prestige. This subgenre is perhaps most tightly associated with the Anglophone world but certainly appears in France and Scandinavia as well. Second, what I call the “Euro-procedural”, a form that was pioneered by the Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöo in the 1960s but that has particularly flourished in the age of globalization, perhaps particularly in Italy. The Euro-procedural stresses, like all procedurals, the grinding and unpleasant day to day work of the detective, caught between a hostile public and a decaying European state; not every crime in the Euro-procedural involves other nations but, when they do, their transnational or transcultural nature is clearly marked, as human capital and valuable illicit materials like drugs are trafficked from the (relative) periphery to the (relative) center. Broadly speaking, the Euro-procedural insists on the boundaries that demarcate national spaces but does so in order to stress both the weakness of the nation state in an era of global crime and movements of capital, material and persons and also to stress the asymmetric relations of power between different nations or cultural spaces.