The importance of place in Italian crime fiction

by Barbara Pezzotti

By taking as its point of departure the privileged relationship between the crime novel and its setting, this book is the most wide-ranging examination of the way in which Italian detective fiction in the last 20 years has become a means to articulate the changes in the social landscape of the country. Through the analysis of the way in which cities, the ‘urban sprawl’, and islands are represented in the serial novels of 11 of the most important contemporary crime writers in Italy of the 1990s, this book articulates the different ways in which individual authors appropriate the structures...