Italy and the Police Procedural: Strange Bedfellows?

[sienamystic]

This is a musing on genre and society, which sounds pompous but isn't, I hope. I've been noodling through something due to recent reading, and this is an attempt at sorting it out a little bit. I'd love to hear what you guys think

Comments

[merriehaskell]

You've noted that they all seem to feature a lone honest cop and are written by non-Italians. Sounds to me like they're not written from an internal cultural viewpoint in the least, but rather that the authors are trying to exorcise their culture shock.

It's analogous to the anachronism in historical fiction, where one character insensibly holds opinions more appropriate to a college-educated modern person than a minor noble in 12th-century Scotland. Sure, the contrast is interesting, but what's the point? What can it really say about the culture?

I think it would be scads more interesting to read an Italian police procedural where a good cop was a good cop by Italian standards, and by the end you were wondering what the big deal about graft was, or something like that. Not an anti-hero, but a hero of the time and place.

[sienamystic]

That would be a much better book, and I wonder if I can find out if such a thing exists. Unfortunatly, my Italian isn't good enough to work through a novel written by an Italian, so I'd have to hope for a good translator.

I wonder if it's not culture shock, per say, but rather a fascination with a more "amoral" police system/culture at large - this may be a distinction without a difference. But it could result in just enough exaggeration to make me uncomfortable - I'd rather not believe that the majority of Italians work constantly surrounded by sharks scheming to gobble them up if they stop paying attention for a second, and I'm a biased enough American that I have trouble wrapping my head around the idea of big crimes - murder, especially - only serving as another battlefield for endless gaming.

[finta]

I've read Dibden and Pears and Leon too, but for an interesting other point of view, I've enjoyed genuine Italian police procedurals, by which I mean Italian novels by Italians. I think those are very useful for getting a sense of what Italians think about their government's corruption (or lack thereof), and in avoiding the stereotypes that foreigners may inadvertently use. I'm fond of the novels of Andrea Camilleri, which involve a Sicilian police officer and are set in Sicily. They're wildly popular in Italy, so even if they're not realistic about how the Italian police work, they're a good picture of how Italians like to imagine their police as being. They've been translated into English recently, so they're available in the US.

[sienamystic]

Brilliant, thanks so much! (And thanks to Condotta for pointing you my way.) I just had this odd moment of putting the Donna Leon book down and saying, "That sucked - but why?" and ended up journaling all of it without being able to see if I was making wild generalizations or not. *scampers off to look up Andrea Camilleri*