Abstract

The essay reflects on the crime novel as a form of reality control and on Leonardo Sciascia’s historical and theoretical interest in this literary genre, which is notable for its precocity in the post-World War II Italian cultural landscape. The disturbing transitivity between the crime novel and crime news events is recognized by the writer for both his own novels and those of other authors, particularly Gadda. The study focuses especially on some underlying but significant relationships between Il giorno della civetta (1961) and the great Gaddian paragon of Il Pasticciaccio (1946 and 1957), defined by Sciascia as “the most absolute ‘crime novel’, that has ever been writtenµ.