A Whiff of Sulphur

There were no children’s books in my parents’ house. Between the ages of 5 and 10, the works of E. Philips Oppenheim, Leslie Charteris, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, Francis Gerard and Sapper, published by the Thriller Book Club to which my father had subscribed before the war, were the only full-length books I read. This has had the effect of making the thriller genre tiresome and puerile for me as an adult, though I do find the odd Carl Hiaasen diverting. Only Michael Dibdin, of modern British thriller writers, has provided sustaining nourishment.

So when an Italian friend recommended a Sicilian writer of detective fiction called Leonardo Sciascia (and pronounced, in the author’s island dialect, as sash-arr), I listened politely but unenthusiastically. He explained that I should begin with A Man’s Blessings, first published in English in 1968 (and in 1992 reissued under the title To Each His Own). In this book, I was told, I would discover the essence of the Sciascia style, and if it was not to my taste I would be saved reading anything else by him. I confess I approached Sciascia with a sigh. Within a page this had developed into a purr of joy, and within the first chapter into a whoop of delight. As soon as I finished the book I began to reread it, and I have since read everything the man has written that has been translated into English. Sciascia’s achievement is to defy Miss Prism’s notion of what fiction means (‘the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily’). Justice is a nonsense. We are shocked but grimly admit an awful reality when good people are killed and the murderers elude capture. We gasp as the innocent are hideously tricked, deceived, injured, left without redress. What is magical in this author is the feeling that he is powerless to prevent the unspeakable happening and this has a charm which both drives the narrative and makes it utterly realistic. The faint, acrid whiff of corruption of the body politic and body social pervades Sciascia’s stories in the same way that a sense of place pervades the work of other writers, and telling details, subtle but devastatingly revealing, are offered in passing, generally in conversation. To Each His Own opens with the delivery, by the postman, of an envelope to the town pharmacist. It contains a sheet of writing, composed of letters cut from a newspaper, threatening the innocent chemist with death. It is surely a joke. The chemist duly meets his end, out hunting at the start of the season with a close friend who is also slaughtered. Only the local schoolmaster, Professor Laurana, is sufficiently enquiring to note certain aspects of the affair to which the investigating police and the gossiping townsfolk are blind, and he takes it upon himself to do some sleuthing of his own. It would spoil the story to give much away here except to say that in the process of working out the identity of the killer and those who hired him, Laurana experiences the stirrings of lust for the chemist’s gorgeous widow and confronts myriad Italian angsts – religion, politics, sexual mores, public manners and the state within a state that is each Italian family. Above it all, as odorous as the incense from a thurible, hangs the unmentionable: the Mafia. Laurana pays his first visit to the widow with his mother, with whom he lives (few sleuths are as well disguised as this school teacher). Later, on a second visit, by now possessed of interesting evidence which he is impatient to discuss, he visits the widow accompanied by her cousin.

‘You’re right,’ the Signora said, and she stood up. Erect, bosom swelling, arms bare to the neatly tufted armpits, winged by a scent in which an expert nose (and a less ardent nature) would have distinguished between Balenciaga and sweat, she overwhelmed the professor, who for a moment saw in her the Victory of Samothrace sweeping up the stairway of the Louvre.

The reader becomes as enraptured with the widow as Laurana is himself. He also becomes an accomplice as the Professor lifts every stone, revealing the beautifully concealed hypocrisy and corruption of every aspect, and every appetite, of the Italian way of life. As well as the slow unfolding of a drama, Sciascia offers a remarkable insight into the Sicilian psyche. He was born in 1921 in Racalmuto, a town that lay deep inside Mafia territory and next door to Sicily’s sulphur mines, in which his father worked. In fact the Mafia was a more poisonous presence than the sulphur mines, with one significant difference. Only the mines were admitted to exist. Both the mines and the Mafia were buried deep and both were a curse, but both represented employment where work was scarce. Sciascia is the child who saw that the Emperor was naked and wrote about it in a deliciously ironic way. It was my second reading of To Each His Own that turned me into a sleuth myself. Surely, if the protagonist of the novel, Professor Paolo Laurana, had not existed, neither would Michael Dibdin’s heroic Aurelio Zen? Talent borrows but genius steals, as Gide reminds us (thinking of Shakespeare) and so let us not condemn Dibdin’s theft for it has given us a canon of marvellous Italian detective stories. Is Professore Paolo Laurana the father of Dottore Aurelio Zen? You’ll have to read To Each His Own and make up your own mind.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 16 © Malcolm Gluck 2007