on Equal Danger: A detective story and an exploration of frustration and paranoia, Equal Danger is at once unforgettable and almost incomprehensible. Judges are being murdered in an unnamed, very corrupt country; Inspector Rogas is called in but things keep getting in his way. Sciascia wrote this as a parody of the detective genre and in the Note at the end he says "I began to write it with amusement, and as I was finishing it I was no longer amused." That kind of sums up my feelings too!

On Day of the Owl: more conventional procedural but still shot through with angst and frustration, finally acceptance, of a broken system that both allows the crime to happen and impedes justice. ( )

Two short novels by the Italian crime writer Leonardo Sciascia. First though a little background on Sciascia who was a politician of some note. A member of the Italian House of deputies--one of those chosen to investigate the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro. He later became a member of the European parliament. Sciascia sees things through a left leaning Socialist/Communist viewpoint which is not to say that he strictly adheres to a party line. Almost all of Sciascia's fiction that I've read and I've read 8 of his works center around Sicily --where Sciascia was born and raised--and in particular around the mafia which Sciascia throughout his works dissects with an elegant--sometimes humorous prose like a fine surgeon would cut someone open with his scalpel. Sciascia as a matter of fact treated the mafia in prose like a cancer surgeon cutting away at the layers of Sicilian culture--its corruption of Sicilian politics, its intrusion into its culture in all areas of Sicilian society including its economics and even into the co-opting of the Catholic church for its purposes. The first novel of the two featured in this book--Day of the Owl is very much along the lines of the above description. Sciascia's language is crisp--the dialogue between the Chief detective and his interviewees is always intriguing--sometimes epiphanic. Finishing the novel--one realizes what he was up against--the impossibility of bringing about a good conclusion even when all the evidence was on his side and he crossed all his t's--dotted all his i's.

The second novel--Equal danger--is somewhat different from much of Sciascia's other works. The country could be or not Sicily--a detective is assigned to find a man who is murdering prosecuting lawyers and judges. He begins to focus on one man in particular who had been unjustly convicted many years before of attempting to murder his wife. As he gets closer though he is taken off his trail and put under the supervision of another detective as it's been decided arbitrarily by the powers that be that these are politically motivated assassinations. Much as he yearns to continue following the trail--he is powerless and follows new directives into nowhere as more killings pile up. Eventually deciding to go off on his own and go after the old trail he winds up just another dead victim of the killer.

Sciascia's books are always interesting. Very intelligent --excellently plotted and showing a sharp political acumen. For those out there who like noir fiction they are hard to beat. ( )