A Simple Story

Leonardo Sciascia had a good claim to be known as the Conscience of Sicily: born and raised on the island, he became one of post-war Italy's most important writers, a journalist, commentator and outspoken participant in Sicilian politics who later in life became a  Member of the European Parliament.

Lest this make him sound worthy, however, he also wrote addictive crime fiction with crackling terseness of a Raymond Chandler or an Elmore Leonard. As a testament to his extraordinary range as a writer, the present volume brings together his last crime story - A Simple Story - with Candido, a cheeky re-imagining of Voltaire that has the long-suffering hero born in a cave on Sicily the night of the Allied invasion, and ends as a luckless traverse of the luckless continent of Europe. It's a ballsy trick, which Sciascia pulls off effortlessly, attacking the utopian nightmares of the twentieth century with all the high irony and finely-honed cruelty that Voltaire's original brought to bear on the Enlightenment.

The title story, meanwhile, is a tautly plotted mystery in which a young and inexperienced policeman in a small Sicilian town begins a murder investigation that  leads him to unearth the rotten foundations of a thoroughly corrupt community. Wildly different as these stories might seem, they share a humane scepticism, a talent for the unexpected, and a vast and humane rage with the state of human affairs. Powerful stuff.