Italian · 1921–1989
A schoolteacher from a sulphur-mining town in the Sicilian interior who turned the detective novel into a tool for investigating power. In 1961 he published The Day of the Owl, the first Italian novel to treat the Mafia as an organisation rather than a folk superstition, at a time when politicians denied it existed. He kept writing versions of the same story — an honest investigator, a crime, a solution that cannot be used — and then applied the method to real cases, most famously in The Moro Affair, written weeks after the Red Brigades killed the Christian Democrat leader. He sat in parliament twice, for the Radicals and as an independent on the Communist list, resigned from the Palermo anti-Mafia commission, and quarrelled publicly with almost everyone, including the anti-Mafia magistrates. He died in Palermo in 1989.