Mediterranean Crime Fiction: Transcultural Narratives in and around the “Great Sea.”

Barbara Pezzotti’s excellent study describes Mediterranean crime fiction as a clearly identifiable field that benefits from being studied through a transnational, world-literature perspective; going beyond the mere geographical location, the “Mediterranean” label tells us something about the region’s identities, the political and social contexts of its various locations, and about their intertwined histories and cultures. The corpus analyzed spans the North and South sides of the Mediterranean, its Eastern and Western shores. It includes Vázquez Montalbán’s Pepe Carvalho and Giménez Bartlett’s Inspector Pedra Delicado, both set in Barcelona; Izzo’s Fabio Montale, in Marseille; Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano, in Sicily; Petros Markaris’s Inspector Haritos, in Athens; Esmahan Aykol’s Kati Hirschel—not a detective as such but the owner of a crime fiction bookshop—in Istanbul; Batya Gur’s Inspector Ohayon in Jerusalem; Yasmina Khadra’s Inspector Llob, in Algiers; and Driss Chraïbi’s Inspector Ali and Abdelilah Hamdouchi’s Inspector Laafrit, both in Morocco.A useful introduction outlines the history of the genre in the countries studied and the position of crime fiction within the respective national canons. Traditionally deemed of little value and even actively censored under dictatorial regimes (especially in Italy, Spain and Algeria), crime fiction from the Mediterranean has recently become a commercial phenomenon but, Pezzotti shows, it is also an important vehicle for social and political critique. The six main chapters discuss various thematic facets, from the construction of the figure of the detective, the locations in which they operate, and the prevalence and role of food, to the detectives’ disillusionment, the sense of history and identity conveyed in the stories, and the treatment of gender. Marginal due to geographical, ethnic, or political reasons, the detective, defined by Pezzotti as “liminal,” frequently engages with a transnational, transcultural concept of the Mediterranean to interrogate the stability of national identities imposed by central governments that devalue, or even seek to erase, ethnic or regional differences. The setting is predominantly that of seaports: cities of immigration and trade, where cross-cultural and racial mixing override any sense of national homogeneity, thereby also challenging the ethnonationalism that dominates many countries’ politics. Pezzotti demonstrates how detection becomes much more than a simple game of finding a culprit, raising broader ethical, political, racial, and religious questions as the notion of an objective justice is complicated by complex issues of historical domination and subordination, hegemony and exclusion, equality and marginalization. If the detectives feel a sense of alienation towards the nation state, on the other hand they are intellectually engaged with Mediterranean history, culture, and with the sea as a space of connections, often leading to an implicit but quite transparent critique of the deathly barriers of contemporary European immigration policies.The detectives read the classics as well as crime fiction, including reading each other (the most obvious example is Camilleri’s Montalbano, named in explicit homage to Vázquez Montalbán). Mediterranean crime fiction is thus rooted in cultural self-awareness, raising the literary status of the genre and countering its traditional relegation to a second-class form. Part of Mediterranean culture, food also often acquires a more profound meaning: it involves families and can signify belonging and connections, such as in the cuisine of immigrant communities celebrated by Izzo’s Montale; Montalbano’s passion for Sicilian food can be seen as a riposte to Northern League politicians who disparage anything coming from the South; while Carvalho is a more inclusive gourmand who appreciates—and cooks—dishes from different parts of Spain (and beyond), celebrating the regional diversity that Franco’s regime had tried to suppress.The cities in which the novels are located have a tradition of chaotic, unauthorized urban developments and include wealthy areas alongside highly deprived ones, but their histories of trading and encounters, dating back to ancient civilizations, generate what Pezzotti calls “active” or “critical” “nostalgia.” Pezzotti adopts the term desencanto (from José Colmeiro’s classic study of Vázquez Montalbán’s work, Crónica del desencanto, 1986) to describe the Mediterranean detectives’ disillusionment with their regions’ problems, the consequence of historical neglect and of the flawed processes of decolonization, democratization, and establishment of the modern nation (including postcolonial nations, such as Algeria and Morocco, as well as the comparatively recent Israeli state). Solving a crime can’t resolve the injustices caused by the traumas of the past, and Mediterranean crime fiction thus emerges as a highly critical genre not only of the present but also of local, national, and regional histories. In this context, marginalization can be seen as the result of an entrenched internal orientalism, exposing the hegemonies and exclusions linked to ethnic, linguistic, or religious identities (in Morocco and Algeria, for example, Berber, Arab, European; Tamazight, Arabic, French, Global English; indigenous, colonial and postcolonial; local ancient religions, Islam, Christianity, and secularism; while in Israel, to give another example, the tensions exposed are not only between Jewish, Arabic, and Christian communities but also, crucially, between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews).The themes outlined so far configure Mediterranean crime fiction as open to otherness, critical, and inclusive, but, Pezzotti argues, in terms of gender, it remains conservative, dominated by the male gaze, and prone to gender stereotyping and objectifying of bodies. Markaris’s and Gur’s more rounded portraits of female characters are exceptions, but the overall tendency is to present crimes against women as the result of individual faults such as jealousy or greed, or of racial or political violence, while undervaluing systemic gender violence—even when written by women or featuring female detectives. Pezzotti sees female detectives in Mediterranean crime fiction as aligned with an individualist post-feminism that values personal advancement over female collective solidarity. I wonder, however, whether this is compounded by that same attachment to Mediterranean traditions that enables the openness to otherness that Pezzotti describes so eloquently: mightn’t this traditionalism, embedded in the local culture (as well as the psyche of the detective), be what prevents full recognition and overcoming of the culture’s pervasive patriarchy and gender inequalities?Clearly establishing the field of Mediterranean crime fiction, Pezzotti’s study will be of great value to anyone interested in crime fiction as a genre and in Mediterranean literature and culture.