Towards a History of Mediterranean Noir

Translated from the Italian by Michael Reynolds

As Jean-Claude Izzo remarked, in the beginning there is the Bible: the first book born on the shores of the Mediterranean, the world’s first great anthology of violent crime stories. From the outset, from Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, this encyclopedic Book of books makes it clear that the history of this sea and the peoples who live on its shores is a history of violence, fratricide, bloodthirsty sackings, abuses of power, lootings and rape. Crime exists. The reasons for its existence are manifold. They reside deep within the soul of man. The Bible tells us that our story begins with a homicide, a homicide that is followed by others, and others still . . .

Like Cain’s heart, the history of the Mediterranean is black.

Then, there are two further extraordinary Noir anthologies: The Iliad and The Odyssey. Both are vast and variegated collections of atrocious crimes. The Iliad glorifies the Greeks’ fierce attack on the Trojans for the control of trade routes. Or, if it is more to the reader’s tastes, it sings the epic tale of Greek heroes in their valorous enterprise to vindicate Paris’s kidnapping of Helen. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is principally a travel book whose hero wants nothing more than to return home. But his journey is protracted by an inordinate number of intrigues and murders.

Bringing to bear the immense power of universal archetypes, all of the Greek tragedies confirm once more that the history of the Mediterranean, of its people and its gods, of its dynasties and its kings, is written in blood.

In light of this, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex may rightly be considered the world’s first Noir novel. In a public letter appearing in 1995 in the magazine Les Temps Modernes, Patrick Raynal, director of the world’s most famous Noir fiction list, Gallimard’s Série Noire, affirmed precisely this: If we can broadly define noir writing and noir inspiration as a way of looking at the world, at the dark, opaque, criminal side of the world, shot through with the intense feeling of fatality we carry within us due to the fact that the only thing we can know for certain is that we will inevitably die, then it can indeed be said that Oedipus Rex was the first noir novel.

In a brief essay published in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, another Frenchman, named Jean-Claude Izzo, master of the Mediterranean Noir novel, reminds us that Raynal had “the courage, or, in some people’s opinion, the impudence,” to publish a reinterpretation of Oedipus Rex in his Série Noire, a reinterpretation that struck a decidedly “hard-boiled” note, Izzo seconds Raynal’s choice: “The Mediterranean Noir novel,” he writes, “is the fatalistic acceptance of the drama that has been weighing upon us since a man first murdered his brother somewhere on the shores of this sea.”

The same elements that characterize these “criminal” interpretations of the classic Greek tragedies, interpretations that put the struggle for power in the foreground, can be found in the novels of the German author Christa Wolf, particularly in her rewritings of the Greek classics Cassandra and Medea. In these works, Wolf tells us that crime and violence are cornerstones of Mediterranean civilization. Medea and Cassandra “investigate” their situations and their worlds and discover that, at the bottom of it all, there exist crime and criminals.

The Mediterranean Noir novel, therefore, represents a search for truth in places characterized by violence, but also by beauty. While these novels offer us a vision of the dark side, the underbelly of society, their settings are invariably places that are caressed by bright sunshine, by blue skies and clear waters.

After this auspicious début under the influence of noir, a début that gives criminality and crime their due (the Bible, The Iliad, the Greek tragedies, etc.), Mediterranean literature turns its back completely on the criminal forces at play in our nations and our neighborhoods. For over two thousand years, there is not a single literary movement that stresses this dark side, that emphasizes the violent and tragic nature of Mediterranean life. Likewise, no literary movement develops an interest in “the investigation”—that is, the systematic search for the truth.

The literature of ancient Rome does not take this direction, nor does Arabic literature during its period of splendor (contemporary to Europe’s Dark Ages). This investigative slant is entirely absent in the traditions of courtly poetry, the ribaldry of the jester and the knave, and the poised verses of cavalier literatures, both serious and parodic. One need only take Cervantes as an example: despite the vicissitudes of his own life, decidedly tragic and even, one might say, noir-esque (the loss of his hand in the battle of Lepanto, his slavery in Algeria, his experience in prison), Cervantes chooses a high, noble, cavalier genre in which to pen his masterpiece, Don Quixote. He recounts a tragic story, but he assumes a tone that is both humorous and ironic.

Likewise, the “investigative tone” is nowhere to be found in French, Italian, or Spanish literatures of the 17th and 18th centuries. Even the experience of marginalization, which has always been crime’s most faithful bedfellow, gives rise in these centuries to artistic expressions that exult in the comic, bawdy elements of the lives of petty thieves, conmen, and everyday tough guys.

There are exceptions, of course: the tragic poetry of Villon dealing with life on the margins of the medieval world; Machiavelli’s tale of savagery and the necessary commingling of politics and criminality; naturally, Dante’s Inferno, a vast gallery of crime and criminals. But these few are the only representatives from the pantheon of great writers who have turned their gaze towards the world of crime, culpability, and violence. Although Italian noirist Massimo Carlotto directs our attention to the world of “gentlemen bandits & brigands,” from Robin Hood to Till Eulenspiegel, this is still a literature belonging to northern Europe, not to the Mediterranean. And, what is more, the Tragic is not a dominant element.

Finally, in the 19th century, a number of great writers attempt an “investigation” into the social and psychological spaces in which crime is born. But once again, this tends to be a largely northern European phenomenon: Dostoevsky, Dickens , Stevenson, the gothic novel, followed in time by the first real crime novels, those of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

There are still few examples of “crime” novels that cast their gaze in the direction of the Mediterranean. In France, Dumas unveils The Count of Montecristo, partially set in Marseilles. Even the great Victor Hugo, who of course remains an essentially romantic and Nordic writer, comments that: “The man who does not reflect lives in blindness. The man who reflects lives in darkness. We have no option but black.” In Italy, Francesco Mastriani’s Neapolitan Mysteries (similar to certain French novels, notably those of Eugene Sue, evincing obvious sociological and socialist tendencies) recounts the world of the Neapolitan criminal underworld, a world populated by the Mafia, by rich robber barons, and by “strangolatori.” But these are tentative, “accidental” steps in the direction of Noir and the Mediterranean. It is not until the twentieth century that we see a genuine birth—or rebirth—of Mediterranean Noir.

The Mediterranean Noir movement only begins to take recognizable form towards the second half of the twentieth century. A particular brand of police or crime fiction commonly bearing the label Noir is first born in America. The name is French, of course, (in American, it is also called “hard-boiled”) but, interestingly, the movement itself does not arrive in France until after the first novels of this new genre have been published in America. Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Dashiell Hammett are at their head of the class. They set about to systematically subvert the canonical mystery tradition à la Agatha Christie. In their novels, there is no policeman, inspector, or constable who neatly solves the case and returns everything to its proper order. Chaos reigns supreme both before and after the investigation. The outcome of the cases, whether solved or not, has no bearing on the general contextual chaos. The author is painfully aware of the fact that out there, in the real world, abuses of power, injustice and violence are the order of the day.

As many contemporary commentators have noted, this awareness corresponds to the growing awareness of a reality formed and manipulated by rabid capitalism, where the difference between legality and illegality is blurred; a reality composed of enormous metropolises, asphalt jungles, on whose margins live hordes of poverty-stricken, desperate individuals, ready to use whatever means necessary to ensure their survival.

In the 1970s, French author Jean-Patrick Manchette is the first to articulate the characteristics of the contemporary noir novel. In an article entitled “Black Like France,” published in the magazine Pulp, Valerio Evangelisti explains Manchette’s contribution to the genre:

“Manchette delineates criminality’s arrival into the otherwise ordinary arenas of political and economic power and describes how, during a period following hard upon a series of failed revolutions, this criminal element starts to impregnate everyday life. Given these changes in the social fabric, the genre we refer to as noir essentially stops being a literature of escapism and becomes a penetrating commentary on contemporary times, a literature that pulses with actuality, that is stained with blood just like the contemporary world it describes. This change first occurs in the United States (Hammett, McCoy, etc.) and then spreads to the rest of the world. Noir’s watchword is pessimism; its weapon is a certain disenchanted honesty. Behind these sentiments lies a kind of moral indignation on the part of writers who once hoped to turn the world upside-down and, having failed, are forced to limit themselves to describing it, pointing out its many contradictions and aberrations in the process.”

But we are still dealing with an American and/or northern European literature, inextricably tied to social conditions that are not those of the Mediterranean: sprawling metropolises, rootless peoples with little or no connection to the neighborhoods in which they live, the solitude of grey northern cities, the deterioration of the family.

During this same period, however, several groundbreaking Mediterranean authors begin looking at reality through a noir lens. They are under the sway of decidedly different elements: strong family and clan ties, closed communities that are bound to their land and neighborhood, minimal urban development. Jean-Claude Izzo considers Albert Camus’s The Outsider to be the prototype of the contemporary Mediterranean Noir novel. It is no accident that Camus is one of very few writers to have been “uprooted” from his Mediterranean home. He is a pied-noir: a French-Algerian émigré in France. And in this, he brings (or brings back) to contemporary literature one strong element that has always belonged to this region’s tradition, but which seems to have been forgotten: the sensation of being uprooted. This is inextricably linked to the intense and continuous migration that characterizes the entire history of Mare Nostrum: the “tragic destiny” weighing on individuals, “the world’s tender indifference” to the suffering and the solitude they feel as a result, the sporadic explosion of violence to which they are subject.

Leonardo Sciascia is another whose oeuvre represents one of the genuine precursors of the Mediterranean Noir novel. His work is dominated by the search for truth and the portrayal of a society dominated and corroded by organized crime. He is one of the first authors to give the mystery genre, previously considered “low literature,” the cachet of high literature. Unlike Camus, Sciascia writes explicitly about crime, violence, and the mafia. Yet, the criminal milieus he describes appear to have been subject to few of the monumental changes that modernity has brought to this region. In his Sicily, old-fashioned mores dominate; the criminality he writes about has not “evolved.” It has been neither uprooted nor contaminated by outside influences.

To find more modernized contributions to the development of a specifically Mediterranean variety of contemporary noir, we must look to the literatures of the eastern Mediterranean, to Levantine authors, and to authors from the Middle East, Egypt, and the Balkans. The tragic sense of life is more pronounced in the work of these authors, as is the sense of deracination and of perpetual movement. We must look to an author like Panait Istrati, born to a Romanian mother and a Greek smuggler father, who was himself reared in an array of cosmopolitan, multiethnic port towns along the shores of the Black Sea, and later disembarks in France. There, he finds a temporary home and a language in which to expertly render this fundamental component of Mediterranean life. His settings are characterized by vast migrations and a burgeoning cultural mix, places that thrive with human exchange and trade, but also with violence and hatred directed at the Other. His characters are sub-proletarian, mariners and smugglers.

Indeed, in Middle-Eastern writing, this type of milieu and these kinds of characters—ports, travelers, mariners, smugglers—are quite common. In his novels, the Cairo-born Egyptian writer who was transplanted to Paris in the post-war period, Albert Cossey, recounts the world of marginalization and small-time criminality permeating the Egyptian capital’s souks. He draws inspiration from these contexts in order to build a florid philosophy devoted to idleness and deviance. Likewise, the Israeli novelist Benjamin Tammuz, a Russian who, as a child, relocated to the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, captures the mystery that cloaks the lives of the peoples who live around this sea, and the legacy of ferocity weighing upon them. These characteristics are particularly pronounced in his most famous novel, Minotaur.

In Greece, at least two authors lead the way towards a new kind of Mediterranean Noir novel. In his book Z, Vasilis Vasilikos recounts some of the political facets of large-scale crime, and in The Story of a Vendetta, Yorgi Yatromanolakis tackles crime’s anthropological features, particularly those connected to one of the Mediterranean’s oldest and most violent traditions: the feud.

These authors pave the way for the advent of the authentic contemporary Mediterranean Noir novel. The noir novel, as mentioned, from its origins in America, arrives in Europe in the seventies via France. The forerunners of this important movement in French—Albert Simenon, Leo Malet, and Boris Vian—and the exponents of the true French noir that begins to surface in the seventies—Jean-Patrick Manchette, Didier Daeninckx, Pierre Siniac, Serge Quadruppani, and many others—recount metropolises (almost exclusively Paris) where capitalism operates at an advanced level, metropolises mired in regional social and interethnic clashes.

As opposed to their American counterparts, these authors are imbued with an intense political consciousness influenced by the upheavals in 1968. They (or their generation) tried to change the world, and failed—their vision now characterized by the pessimism that this failure has bred in them. They see all the world’s injustices and its occult powers laid bare, and they cannot remove their gaze from the decay hiding within high-rise buildings and the desperation of the slums. They carry within them a characteristic sympathy for society’s losers, and despite their disappointments in the political and social arenas, they are thirsty for the truth.

But the Mediterranean shoreline is still a long way away. The landscape, or rather the seascape, is missing; the colors and the aromas are nowhere to be found. The violence that is born in the grey industrial wastelands of northern cities, in the dank cold and lingering darkness, is one thing, but the shocking, sudden violence of the Mediterranean—violence lying dormant in human limbs caressed by the heat of the sun, and a sea that overwhelms—is quite another. The ferocious passions of the south, its oppressive beauty, the “gilded unhappiness” that Camus speaks of, are all missing. The peoples and ethnicities swarming around the Mediterranean’s shores, clambering here from the south, from the east, to claim their share of the riches, are nowhere to be seen. There is no blue and black, the two abiding colors of the Mediterranean according to Jean-Claude Izzo.

Perhaps one of the first authors who deliberately wrote Mediterranean Noir novels is the Spaniard Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. At the core of his novels, there is a great Mediterranean port: Barcelona. Food, gastronomy, the pleasures of being seated at a table in good company; the Mediterranean lifestyle, that antique art of living that has reached its apotheosis in this region, dominates his settings. There is also a political dimension, linked to present consequences and their relationship to past conflicts. This same dimension will be rediscovered several years later in the work of authors who consolidate the success of Mediterranean Noir: Izzo, Khadra, Martín, Carlotto, and others.

In Vázquez Montalbán, however, these characteristics remain embedded in a context that is, essentially, far from being tragic. At times, indeed, it is often openly and intentionally comic. The cloak-and-dagger game of the traditional police novel prevails, and knowledge of real criminality is underdeveloped. We find the same characteristics in the novels of Andrea Camilleri, where costume, fun and games with the Sicilian dialect, and regional mores and customs count far more than real criminality. Another Italian author, the Neapolitan Peppe Ferrandino, heads in the same direction: reality is, in some ways, reinvented. The new criminal realities of the Mediterranean, and the various conflicts attendant upon them, interest Ferrandino only insofar as they provide the catalyst for something different. In and of themselves, they do not represent fertile terrain deserving of deeper inquiry.

This “playful” vein is furthered, in a less dramatic mood, by the Moroccan author Driss Chaibri, and the investigations of his Inspector Ali. With wit and humor, these books introduce us to crime as it unfolds on the southern shores of our sea. Contemporaneously, two original sources of psychological noir come to us from Israel, the blackly humorous novels of Edna Mazya and the more traditional mysteries of Batya Gur, each portraying specific aspects of Israeli society with expertise and panache. Another female writer, Shulamit Lapid, completes this trio of Israeli noir, unique among the literatures of the Mediterranean inasmuch as it is composed of three women. Yet another author, notable for both her finely honed talent and for the fact that she is a female author writing in a genre that is, in this region, dominated by males, is Elena Ferrante. Her Troublesome Love captures the tragedy and the latent violence that are perennial features of an ancient Mediterranean tradition.

But, ultimately, real violence does break in, hand in hand with the ancient but seemingly forgotten tradition of Mediterranean tragedy, in the novels of the Frenchman Jean-Claude Izzo, the Algerian Yasmina Khadra, the Catalan Andreu Martín, the Greek Petros Markaris, the Italians Massimo Carlotto, Carlo Lucarelli, Giancarlo De Cataldo, Osvaldo Capraro and Maurizio Braucci, and the German-born author based in Trieste, Veit Heinichen. These novels are born in port towns like Algiers, Marseilles, Barcelona and Naples, and in frontier towns on the northern borders of Italy. They share a common understanding: the Mediterranean has become, once more, a region rife with clashes, and political and ethnic conflicts; a place teeming with sackings of various sorts, with the fight for survival, with immense waves of migration, with war, with colossal concentrations of vested interests. Criminal appetites from all over the world—from the Slavic countries, from China and Southeast Asia, from Nigeria and central Africa—converge on the Mediterranean and enter into conflict with local criminal realities—the Sicilian Mafia, the camorra, the criminal milieu of Marseilles and the organized crime rampant in North Africa. Furthermore, this criminality is increasingly linked to “legal” or “respectable” activities, creating an opaque fabric that is virtually impenetrable.

This reality is continuously and contiguously undergoing transformation. It is influenced by new migration patterns and new criminal interests. It is, as Massimo Carlotto has noted, a reality that is determined by the lack of a genuine culture of investigation, and the lack of certain mechanisms that would otherwise ensure the integrity of crime scenes. This means that the solutions to criminal cases rest entirely in the hands of the investigator and his or her ability to manipulate the shreds of information supplied by informers, collaborators, and contacts who inhabit a variety of marginal and largely illegal contexts.

Of course, these factors supply an inestimable wealth of incandescent material suitable for literary creation. Ambiguity, the razor’s edge between right and wrong, the often slight differences that separate the good guys from the bad guys, characteristics that have been part of noir since its origins in the United States, are further accentuated by factors that are thoroughly Mediterranean.\

Invariably, these novels are peopled by indifferent cops, ex-cops, private investigators, and small-time crooks who are all painfully aware of the ominous growth of political-economic power structures that cohabitate with criminality. They are impotent and inefficient before this overwhelming power. In the final equation, their methods and the means at their disposal amount to naught. These personages are often on the side of the victims of this conglomeration of legal and illegal interests: immigrants, ex-cons, crooks, and losers. Their real objective is not necessarily that of solving the case or finding the guilty party—though this may sometimes be the catalyst for their investigations—but rather to use whatever means necessary, legal or illegal, to protect the weak and to vex the powerful. These novels are set wherever vast movements of people and power happen, wherever there is conflict and massive accumulations of wealth.

The prevailing vision in the novels belonging to the genre known as Mediterranean noir is a pessimistic one. Authors and their literary inventions look upon the cities of the Mediterranean and see places that have been broken, battered, and distorted by crime. There is always a kind of dualism that pervades these works. On one hand, there is the Mediterranean lifestyle—fine wine and fine food, friendship, conviviality, solidarity, blue skies and limpid seas—an art of living brought almost to perfection. On the other hand, violence, corruption, greed, and abuses of power. There is sadness in these books, and a sense of longing for what the Mediterranean could have been: Khadra’s Algeria disfigured by violence, corruption and fanaticism; Izzo’s Marseilles devoured by the greed of property developers and the racism of the National Front; Carlotto’s Italy insulted by a justice system that doesn’t work.

The story of this sea is blue and black. And it is still being written.