The uncertain geography of global noir

Even if we don’t want to take Jean-Patrick Manchette’s words too seriously, who already stated at the end of the 1970s that “the crime novel is the great moral literature of our time”, no one will be able to deny how many interpretative keys to the reality that surrounds us provided what has long been regarded as just one of many forms of popular fiction. Just to the master of the neo-polar following all, we owe the story of restless France following De Gaulle, a mixture of authoritarian itches and end-of-empire revanche, a reality whose development Didier Daeninckx would later measure by widening his gaze to the lost territories of the banlieues.

And, in the same way, it is difficult to imagine the urban and social development of the sprawling city of Los Angeles, analyzed by the late Mike Davis, if not also thanks to the support of the novels of Raymond Chandler first and then of James Ellroy. Not to mention the tumultuous and contradictory Chinese growth that Qiu Xiaolong described through the investigations of Shanghai police inspector Chen Cao. A list that might of course continue, and for a long time. But a new feature seems to have meanwhile added to the qualities of the crime novel.

FROM MIRROR, sometimes decidedly alienating from the social reality that sets noir, crime, crime, traditional or completely innovative as its background, has in fact transformed into a global phenomenon, often the narrative form that finds greater correspondence, and followed of readers, to the four corners of the planet. Urban literature par excellence, nourished precisely by the contradictions that move existence in metropolitan spaces, noir – in recent years also thanks to TV series and the development of online entertainment platforms – has ended up increasingly adopting a figure of novel of the global world, almost the tool of the story of identities, individual and collective, grown in the urban dimension or in realities which, without really being a metropolis, however have nothing left of the small center or rural space.

The extension of the detective story’s space of meaning has also corresponded to the multiplication of languages ​​and forms of expression, another element that has ended up making this narrative a sort of permanent research laboratory in and around the dimension of the novel in its many meanings. It is therefore not surprising that sifting through some recently published titles in the sector, one can grasp both the element of research innovation and that of the reflected image of the global world.

Paul Morel, an artist imprisoned on charges of killing one of his lovers, asks Vilela, an ex-cop who became a successful writer, to accompany him in his narrative projects, revealing to the interlocutor the outline of a novel project during the visiting hours in the Rio de Janeiro prison where he is being held. Released in 1973 in Brazil and now proposed for the first time in our country by Fazi (pp. 198, euro 18, translation by Daniele Petruccioli) The Morel case revealed the extraordinary authorial skills of Ruben Fonseca, one of the most important figures of Brazilian noir, and of all Latin America, who passed away in 2020 following a long and fruitful career.

IN THAT NOVELFonseca announced many of the themes that would also later constitute the hallmark of his stories: on the one hand a neo-realist system, specifically the Rio of nightlife, between prostitutes, criminals, immigrants from poor areas of the interior exploited in every sense and a decadent and bored bourgeoisie and, on the other, a reckless and visionary plot, in the plot the boundary between the investigations that Vilela will end up leading – a sort of alter ego of the author – and what Morel’s manuscript announces crumbles with grace in several points, revealing characters with a complex and surprising personality.

ALSO FOR SARAH BLAUIsraeli writer who made her debut two years ago with a noir reinterpretation of the myth of the Golem (The Book of Creation, Carbonio, an interview with the author appeared on these pages on October 25, 2020) the context in which the characters move, in particular the reality of Israel marked by religious impulses and the growth of the presence of the ultra-Orthodox, it is the basis on which to graft a psychological thriller where no one really appears for what they really are. In The others (Piemme, pp. 260, euro 18.90, translation by Velia Februari) the plot is, at least in appearance, all female: Sheila survives the barbaric murder of two of her best friends, Dina and Ronit, with whom she had started over twenty years earlier the theology studies that would have led them to interpret the pages of the Bible with a gender perspective.

The story that returns, or rather the moment in which the ghosts of their past decide to collect the bill that was contracted with them, is the backdrop to Moronga by Horacio Castellanos Moya (Rizzoli, pp. 334, euro 19, translation by Raul Schenardi) a Salvadoran author who chose to move to the United States to escape the threats received in his own country. It is in this reality that his stories stage the world of exiles, and of the survivors of the conflicts they took part in at home. Two former guerrillas from El Salvador find themselves in a small town in Wisconsin, both determined to build a new life, leave wounds and mourning behind, forget and be forgotten. The kidnapping of a little girl and a stranger who has set out on their trail will end up definitively undermining the serene patina of their new existences, revealing a horizon made of violence, where the drift of former comrades in struggle, the Maras network, the power of drug traffickers threaten to force them to start a new war, this time for simple survival.

THE ECHO OF MEMORY which can become a threat also takes on more exquisitely narrative forms. This is the case of the writer Ahmet Ümit, refined protagonist of the Turkish detective story, who with Our love is an old novel (Scriturapura, pp. 228, euro 18, translation by Nicola Verderame) builds a literary yellow that starts from the murder of a wealthy bibliophile in Istanbul’s Pera Palas by a woman who looks nothing less than Agatha Christie.

Commissioner Nevzat, the (unwillingly) undisputed hero of Ümit’s stories and former star of New Year in Istanbul (Scriturapura, 2021) where the police investigation joins the social one, between the echoes of the Gezi Park affair and the weight of building speculation in the metropolis overlooking the Bosphorus, will have to deal with the ghosts that seem to take shape from books as with far more concrete and dangerous threats. Ultimately, for him as for Ümit himself, the real risk lies not so much in failing to complete an investigation, as in wasting that opportunity that has been granted to us to really understand who we are dealing with: «A murder investigation it does not consist only in the search for the murderer. And it’s not even regarding solving a complex mathematical problem, in which numbers are people and operations are facts. It is rather the effort to fully understand the human being, the commitment to find a right way of life”.