Introduction: The Mysterious Case of Crime Fiction in Italy -- Part One: Beccarian Introspection -- 1 Investigative Introspection: Cesare Beccaria's Disembodied Criminal -- 2 Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia's Enlightened Detectives -- 3 Andrea Camilleri's Sicilian Simulacrum -- 4 Violence and the Law in Gianrico Carofiglio's Beccarian Courtroom -- Part Two: Lombrosian Vivisection -- 5 Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal -- 6 Carlo Emilio Gadda's Bodies of Evidence -- 7 Dario Argento's Aesthetics of Violence -- 8 Carlo Lucarelli's Lombrosian Nightmare -- Epilogue: Crime in the Twenty-First Century
Past traces the roots of the twentieth-century literature and cinema of crime to two much earlier, diverging interpretations of the criminal: the bodiless figure of Cesare Beccaria's Enlightenment-era On Crimes and Punishments, and the biological offender of Cesare Lombroso's positivist Criminal Man
