Urban-planning crime dramas

This detective story, this crime novel, is anything but minor literature. Its plot is like “a pretext to sound out and narrate the volatile, suffering humanity of Italy”. These are the words of Gianni Biondillo, an architect and above all a writer of crime novels, and the editor of Elementi di urbanistica noir, published by EuroMilano. This is a collection of writings on urban landscapes and fantastical constructions that, as well as being literary settings, often turn out to be real characters in an intertwining of crimes, business deals, passions and interests. The imaginative illustrations by Marialuisa Montanari are original proof of this. Biondillo mentions the father of this type of novel, Edgar Allan Poe and he pays tribute to Andrea Camilleri, who shows how working simultaneously on the richness of language and on the plot can lead to great “literature” and “quality entertainment”. Contemporary crime novels have basically “felt that there is a new perception of society and have tried to convey fear through traumas that are staring us in the face”. So here we have Maurizio De Giovanni telling us about Naples, with its popular and Camorra-run districts, Roberto Costantini picking up the fragments that bind Rome to Tripoli, Marco Vichi on late-nineteenth-century Florence, Carlo Lucarelli on the dark, murky side of Bologna, Valerio Varesi on Parma riven by the anxieties of the most provincial outposts and, lastly, Biondillo on a rapacious, tough, and criminal Milan far from the bright lights. Elementi di urbanistica noir Edited by Gianni Biondillo Euromilano, 2020