Value(s) (f)or money? Modes and motives of crime in contemporary Italian fiction

Di Ciolla, Nicoletta (2001) Value(s) (f)or money? Modes and motives of crime in contemporary Italian fiction. New Comparison, 32. pp. 89-107. ISSN 0950-5814

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Abstract

Female-authored crime fiction is a relatively new literary phenomenon in Italy and has experienced considerable growth in recent years. Departing from a predominantly foreign tradition, essentially dominated by men, Italian women writers have appropriated the genre and adapted it to their own aesthetic. This paper looks at two crime novels, written by Fiorella Cagnoni and Francesca Duranti respectively and featuring two amateur female detectives. Both novels deal with a money scam, hinting at financial gain through fraud as the reason behind the crimes, which in both cases include murder. Given that murder and fraud are the two most common types of crime narrated in detective fiction, the paper considers to what extent the authors have conformed to the established conventions of the genre, or whether this ostensible adherence to structural and thematic rules becomes the vehicle for the articulation of further, unresolved, anxieties. It seeks to establish whether Cagnoni and Duranti's contribution to female-authored crime fiction exhausts itself in their having created female characters engaged in traditionally male activities, or whether they have been able to enhance the expressive potentialities of the genre in Italian literature by adding to it a further, gender-specific dimension.