Leonardo Sciascia, the Italian detective novelist and essayist, was born in Racalmuto in western Sicily in 1921. Sciascia’s reshaping of the detective novel, or giallo (so-called because the first Italian crime fiction came in yellow – giallo – dustjackets) was political. Sicily served Sciascia as a metaphor for the political corruption not only on mainland Italy but also, Moorehead contends, in ‘the world’. In some ways, says Moorehead, Sciascia had introduced a Pirandellian drama of troubling uncertainties and mirror games to the giallo. During the early 1980s when gangland violence from heroin trafficking overwhelmed Palermo, Sciascia was expected to make oracular pronouncements on all aspects of Mafia-influenced clientelist crime.