La Cattiva Strada

Somebody moved behind the brown door: first on the left, then on the right; first footsteps, then a muted rumpling of fabric and the clanking of pots; the concierge's grey eyes seemed to penetrate the wood in pursuit of the invisible noise.-- Georges Simenon, The Engagement

It isn't that one doesn't perceive the strategism within the provincial puzzles of Andrea Camilleri; Simenon was one of his influences, and it shows in the flowering absurdity and pathos of his local color. His narratives are as much about the terrible transmutation of the Old World into contemporary materialism, the one vomiting into the other with the repugnance of centuries old collapse, as they are about the fraud and corruption which truly besiege the carabinieri and all of Europe. Less murder, more graft. In the States, regardless of ethnicity, to an extent, most murders are an emotional argument: kill the wife and stage a suicide, get rid of the bitch on my ass, or go serial predator to assuage the corrosion of pathological pain. Americans go postal, enjoy blockbuster slaughter. Europe, excepting the transplantation of the mafisio, whose golden age was killed off by the ruthlessness of the FBI, is a bit different. The players are dirty, do business off the books, and authors obfuscate their real critique by leaving a dead body around; that real critique takes aim at provincialism, dirty money, and the plight of migrants, like Pakistanis who leave the volatility of the Iron Triangle, only to be victimized beneath placid milk white  surfaces. For the more swarthy Sicilians, who aren't as European as the Germans, the stigma may envelop Tunisians, but for Camilleri, it is the same formula as other mystery writers from the Continent, his progressive cues play out a bit differently than they do in American class conflicts. Spastic cripples like Bejou are simply what they are, dirty, unwashed, going off under stress, part of the comic poke of Italian effacement after centuries of diminishing hegemony.

The problem: Luca Zingaretti's screwball antics, especially when played off Peppino Mazzotta, feel forced by Rai television, and the mesh of the horrific lengths to which the criminal will go against the scatological gossip filling in the blanks doesn't quite work, not that Rai does err on the side of grandiosity, but Zingaretti is an insult to true Roman heritage, may he dormire con i pesci, grinding my teeth. You cannot win them all.