Architecture and crime stories

Andrea Camilleri, Dentro il labirinto, Skira, Milan, 2012, 179 pp.

Edoardo Persico, Profezia dell'architettura, Skira, Milan, 2012, 64 pp.

There's nothing new about a writer being drawn to Edoardo Persico. Elio Vittorini and Leonardo Sciascia, for example, had already focused on him, as stated in the bibliography of Andrea Camilleri's latest book. Persico started out as a writer before becoming a publisher, journalist, gallery owner and, finally, an architect, but Camilleri's interest in him remains within the confines of crime fiction. This genre has dominated the last two decades of Italian literature, and Camilleri, with his Inspector Montalbano, has been its best-known voice.

Detective novels have always had a fascination with the world of urban design and architecture, and together with similar genres that have also shared this interest, they have helped to create a vast field that has turned judicial investigation into a stylistic tool with which to interpret and narrate crucial and unresolved episodes of recent history. This field covers both Carlo Lucarelli's reconstructions of famous crime cases as well as episodes of exposé or "narrative theatre" driven by figures such as Gabriele Vacis and Marco Paolini, and it has been so hugely influential that it even appeared in the Design Dance event that opened Milan's Salone del Mobile. Raising its head at the opposite end of this field is the front of the provocative "against architecture" pamphlets (to quote Franco La Cecla's successful text, recently translated into Japanese) that filled bookshops in the same period.

These examples are often described as investigative literature although they should more rightly be linked to the popular phenomenon of architecture in fiction, to be investigated in the New Journalism style mastered by Tom Wolfe (an unabridged Italian translation of his The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine- Flake Streamline Baby was recently proposed, which at last also contains the crucial article on Las Vegas that is behind all the variations of Learning from…).

Returning to Camilleri, his work remains entirely within the boundaries of the invented story. But Camilleri is not Ayn Rand, he did not write The Fountainhead, and he did not film My Architect, or Sketches of Frank Gehry. Nor did he write Le Corbusier: A Life, in an attempt to extend the practice of bad biographies to the field of the archistar. Camilleri does not put Persico in bed with Josephine Baker on an ocean liner sailing for the Southern Seas. He sees Persico as a sad, cheap loser of a human being, found dead in the toilet of his home, after having been there for some days. His sordid and mysterious death could quite easily be taken as the riddle of all European history, architectural history included — a riddle that goes beyond the list of clues to convey all the compromises between intellect and power of the 20th century.

Camilleri's story is thrilling because it is not built on facts drawn from glossy magazines, but rather on academic readings pondered with a detective's mind. He thus multiplies the approach of the circumstantial paradigm with a nouveau-roman style, arriving at a strange and innovative historical-narrative essay. Indeed, the presence of a bibliography coupled with the artistic vocation of the book's publisher, Skira, would suggest how much Camilleri loved playing the historian, whatever he may have said.

If we still had any doubts, the publisher comes to our aid: in concurrence with the publication of the Sicilian writer's work, Skira has gathered four of Persico's main essays in a book bearing the title of the most famous of these — Profezia dell'architettura [The Prophecy of Architecture]. Such a title speaks volumes and the whole process gels into an overall strategy, aimed partly at rediscovering the role that the Neapolitan critic played in the construction of a historiography and an original and unique criticism for European architectural culture.