“Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic”— Raymond Chandler
In an essay for The Atlantic Monthly, Raymond Chandler
expressed his opinion on the state of contemporary crime fiction, circa 1944.
He looked with admiration upon Dashiell Hammett. Of his contemporaries, he
praised some and took others to task with biting sarcasm and sharp wit. His cri de coeur was against crime fiction
from the point of view of the criminal. He seethed at stories in which justice was
not achieved by the end of the story. In short, Chandler restated the old
argument that artists are morally responsible for the work of art they produce.
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Organized crime – whether
it is ethnic, corporate, or political – interests me. Violence does not. There
is violence in my books, but I do not dwell on it, nor do I embroider it. I’d
rather leave the details to the reader’s imagination; it makes for effective
writing. A coroner’s report on a murder victim conveys the physical damage, and
the reader’s horror is derived from imagining the sequence of the violent acts,
the victim’s last moments, and the clinical portrait of a body, the object and
not the person.
Can a writer write about
crime in Italy without mentioning the mafia? The answer: probably not. To
complicate matters: which mafia are we talking about? Naples has the Camorra.
Sicily has Cosa Nostra. Calabria has the ’Ndràngheta. Lesser-known criminal groups
are Puglia’s Sacra Corona Unita, and the Basilichi in the Basilicata region.
Americans associate mafia
with Sicilians, with glamor and omertà,
the ‘code of silence,’ thanks to movie The
Godfather, whereas Italians perceive it as a resilient and unfortunate tapeworm
attached to their society. No matter which mafia we discuss, no matter how
sophisticated their criminal enterprise has become through money laundering,
the foundation is intimidation and violence. No amount of education, finesse,
or sartorial elegance will ever transform Tony Soprano beyond what he is: a
thug.
Chandler was not beyond
ambiguity. Marlowe did do dicey things; Hammett’s Spade was certainly even darker
at times, but both detectives stood for something and their word and handshake
meant something. They got justice. Writers have to stand for something is what
Chandler was saying. I agree with him. My characters in the Roma Series care about and love other as
they navigate a morally corrupt world. Their cases are important, but how their
relationships deepen or come into conflict is more important to me as the
writer.
I’d like to conclude on an
upbeat note. Italians are fighting back. Many shops throughout Sicily have the Addiopizzo (Bye-bye bribe) sticker in
their windows to let their customers know that they are not a mafia-owned
business. The sticker is a combination of anti-corruption and grassroots activism.
Germany has the same concept with Nein
dankel (No thanks) to combat the ’Ndràngheta. Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino,
who lost their lives fighting the Sicilian mafia, would smile at their legacy.
Gabriel lives in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the author of the Roma Series, available from Winter Goose Publishing. Gabriel has also written numerous short stories and essays found online and in print.
