One of the few inheritances I received from my mother was a crate full of books, all Gialli Mondadori crime novels, from Edgar Wallace’s The Avenger, published in the series in 1931, through to issue no. 381, Agatha Christie’s Hickory Dickory Dock, published in 1956. American noir, of course, dominated almost unchallenged, although the most extreme titles of the hard-boiled school were published by Garzanti. There were very few Italian writers. Among them was a name destined to become famous not so much as a writer, but as a screenwriter: Sergio Donati. I met him in Turin, on the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to Sergio Leone, with whom he had a long-standing collaboration, from For a Few Dollars More to Once Upon a Time in the West and Duck, You Sucker!.
At his most experimental, and heavily influenced by Antonioni’s Blow-Up, Brass crafts a thriller/noir steeped in the psychedelia of Swinging London, layering the cinematic narrative across multiple registers. After his brilliant debut with the anarchic “Chi la...
The novel was The Paper Tomb (Il sepolcro di carta), published in the Il Giallo Mondadori series on March 24, 1956. Inside are all the ingredients of classic noir: the often hazy lights of nightclubs, background music drifting between the tables, locked-room murders, cigarettes lit and then crushed into ashtrays, the police investigator regularly preceded by the enterprising private detective, in this case a brilliant crime reporter. Nor are there any lack of dark, powerful cars, necessarily Chrysler DeSoto V8s, their showy fins slicing through the night. But a Fiat 1100 also appears, the height of luxury in Italy at the time. Because yes, the story is set in Italy, even if the references are very few. The narrative framework is a war between American and French drug distributors competing for the Italian market. In the finest noir tradition there is also a dark lady, but in Donati forget negligées and sheer stockings. Eleven years later it would be Tinto Brass who shifted that material into another visual era: Ewa Aulin, in Deadly Sweet (Col cuore in gola), would be an entirely different apparition.
