Since I was a boy, I desired only two things in my life. Not money or fame. No, I’ve always had too healthy an ego to crave that. What I wanted was to be a writer, and I longed to return to Italy, the country of my parents’ birth.
No one in my family was a writer and there weren’t many books in my home. To a set of parents from the war-torn and the poverty-stricken mezzogiorno—only one of whom made it out of grammar school—a book was a luxury, unless it was a textbook. Yet I became a journalist and author. Perhaps unlike most writers, for me the desire to scribble stories on a page came at a precise moment:
It happened in Mrs. Hogan’s (I hope you are still out there.) 7th grade English class at St. Sebastian’s School. I remember her tall and thin, smart and stylish, with her silvery-colored hair in a bob.
One day, she said, “Girls and boys, today I want you to write a story. Make it up out of thin air. Take the whole class period. It can be about anything.” Until then, I’d done nothing original. I was stunned that writing a story came so easy to me and that I loved it more than baseball, more than Regina, my first girlfriend, more than anything I’d ever done in my life.
And the two things that I had always wanted to do came to pass together. I did get to Italy and my novel was published, The Man in Milan, by Polis Books. My two desires would be inextricably intertwined.
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I arrived a freshly minted AP-Dow Jones bureau chief for Italy in the mid-90s. Even then, a good decade and a half after the June 27, 1980 Ustica plane downing (which my novel uses as a fulcrum to the story), the Ustica Strage (strage means massacre in Italian) was still front-page news. The Italians called it a massacre because they knew it was foul play.
The Man in Milan is a fiction based on the mysterious crash of Itavia Flight 870, near the island of Ustica, with 81 lives lost, on June 27, 1980. Some thought it was a Red Brigades bomb, others blamed the Mafia or fascist groups, and then there was the coincidence of several fighter jets of four nations being in the air very near Flight 870 that night, a fact not revealed at first. The plane and 81 people went down without a Mayday. It simply disappeared from radar screens, a mystery and one that served powerful forces to stay that way. And it has.
Those days in Italy were called “gli Anni di Piombo,” the years of lead, when la Brigata Rossa, Red Brigades, robbed banks, killed policemen and abducted politicians and members of the upper classes.
Just last June 27, 2021, there were yet more stories in the Italian press memorializing the massacre. The wound is deep.
The thing that intrigued me is that the Italian government didn’t seem that interested in finding out what happened. No group claimed responsibility. It didn’t even raise the plane from the sea until over a decade later, though where it rested was known. Some didn’t want it solved.
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Italy also brought me to Leonardo Sciascia, a writer who belongs in every bookshelf yet has never gotten his due, though nominated for a Nobel Prize more than once. In Italy, he is recognized among the greats, but outside his native land he’s not. Perhaps it comes from being seen as a regional (Sicilian) writer of mysteries. Some of his best works are slim, often less than 200 pages, about murder mainly, hardly the introspective, moody doorstoppers that win prizes.
To read Sciascia is to become acquainted with the contours of his dark Sicilian landscapes. Like a painter who uses few strokes, his novels and stories capture the island and its deep fatalism. Corruption of the state and society infiltrates his work, from feckless police murder investigations to the inability of the people—cowed by fear—to act morally.
Sciascia’s lead characters wish to do the right thing, fervently and often at risk of their lives. It’s just that they don’t succeed, they never will, and they are lucky to be still breathing in the closing pages.
He does this all in what seems simple crime fiction and a mystery, where the silences are as important as the prose. When questions are asked, answers sometimes are given, sometimes not, and sometimes there’s just a turn of the face, a movement of the hands. Who kills whom isn’t directly revealed, and yet the reader can know for the clues are there, in a cigar butt on the ground, for example, in To Each His Own, a favorite of mine, along with The Day of the Owl, and Equal Danger.
Perhaps what I love most about Sciascia is that he doesn’t give readers the satisfaction of a crime solved or good winning out. He’s been called a pioneer of the “anti-detective” novel, where “order restored” is rejected. The bad aren’t found out, they aren’t punished. In fact, they go on doing all the terrible things they’ve been doing with implacable impunity. The people shrug their shoulders at evil, knowing it cannot be banished.
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Anther writer who influenced me and also hasn’t gotten enough credit is Dorothy Hughes, who wrote In a Lonely Place. A seminal, truly great and influential novel that should have been called “In a Dark Place,” it is my favorite noir book in English. Its worst fault is only that it has probably been eclipsed (unjustly) by the movie version, thanks to the star, Humphrey Bogart. Now I love the film but in typical Hollywood fashion, it cops out. I won’t spoil it for you. Read the book, see the movie and see if I’m not right.
I guess I like the dark side and that’s why Jim Thompson is another big favorite of mine. His The Killer Inside Me is one of the scariest books I have ever read. I read it with my adrenaline running high. And his The Grifters is pure poetry, a lovely story that is in no real rush, about a type of folk that live in the cracks of society. Here Hollywood did it justice with a film of the same name.
Perhaps the greatest thing about being a writer is this: A friend who read The Man In Milan warned me, when she was halfway into it, that if I killed off a certain character she loved, then she would never speak to me again. How cool is that?
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