Battling evil, and its long reach

The Day of the Owl
By Leonardo Sciascia
New York Review, 124 pp.,
paperback, $12.95

Equal Danger
By Leonardo Sciascia
New York Review, 119 pp.,
paperback, $12.95

Is the world a reasonable place? Detective novels urge us to think so, writes Carlin Romano in his fascinating introduction to Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia's exquisite third novel, "Equal Danger" (1971), rereleased recently by New York Review Books along with his outstanding first novel, "The Day of the Owl" (1961). "Evidence accumulates, inferences mount, conclusions arrive on time," Romano says. But this is Sicily, and these two enormously entertaining crime novels, with spot-on perfect translations, work not only as page-turning detective stories. They are serious, brilliant, literary studies of the "unchanging Sicilian blight," as Boston book critic George Scialabba, in his incisive foreword to "Owl," calls the Mafia and the torpor it spreads over the land. (Read each foreword after the book, so as not to spoil the surprises.)

Sciascia (1921--89) accomplishes more in each of these 120-page novels than most writers in thrice that many, illuminating with droll and increasingly dark humor characters he calls "individuals but also figures -- of age-old degradation, of folkish cunning, of refined corruption, of barbaric or civilized virtue."

When it appeared, "Owl" quickly became a classic, partly because it was the first book to portray an organization that virtually no one was willing to acknowledge existed. A "build-up" and a "Northern Italian prejudice," the Mafia is called by two Sicilians in one of the many wonderfully ominous, infuriating conversations by unnamed "eminences" who, as Scialabba says, form a "kind of chorus" to Captain Bellodi's investigation.

Which begins immediately: On Page 1 a local contractor is gunned down in the plaza of a Sicilian town, and Bellodi comes to investigate in a way very foreign and unnerving to the Sicilians. To an informer whom Bellodi questions, for example, "the law was utterly irrational, created on the spot by those in command."

Such are the penetrating portrayals of the various distinct and flawed characters populating the book, confirming that character is the chief ingredient of destiny. But Bellodi's character is one not just of honor but also decency -- though not without his own flaws and doubts, as well as urges, born of frustration, to abuse his power. But he treats his suspects with kindness and consideration, surprising them -- and lulling them into letting things slip.

Significantly, Bellodi doesn't just use facts and reason to solve the case: He also employs intuition, imagination, an assumption the Mafia exists, and even trickery -- one must fight fire with fire.

This is one of many points Sciascia expands upon in "Equal Danger" a decade later, his immense growth as a writer plainly evident. The prose is even finer and more exact, still without feeling rushed or forced. The diction is higher, the mind behind the story clearly wiser. Also higher are the stakes.

Inspector Rogas, investigating the ongoing murder of judges in an unnamed country, agrees that "a fact is an empty sack," recalling a quote from somewhere. "One had to put the man, the person, the character inside the sack for it to hold up." An unorthodox cop who reads literary reviews, Rogas takes a quixotic approach to the investigation while his unconscious sifts through the evidence. He also doesn't give in to the easiest explanation, nor to his higher-ups' early, foreboding admonition not to expose anything that would embarrass the judiciary.

As implied with Bellodi, "Rogas had principles, in a country where almost no one did."

Darker than "Owl," less droll, more wry and direct, "Equal Danger" seems the logical culmination and fusion of "Owl" and Sciascia's strong second novel, "To Each His Own," funny but more ominous than "Owl." The motives in the first two -- Mafia power and individual passions -- intertwine in "Equal Danger" such that the sum is much greater than the parts.

In all three books Sciascia demonstrates that only those with imagination and subtlety of mind can catch the criminals in Sicily. And yet, like Orwell's Winston Smith, it is exactly such people whom the system cannot let win.

The system? As Romano points out -- and the author confirms in his end note -- Sciascia's concept of Mafioso is "far broader than the family business empires we associate with Corleones." Romano compares it to the American '60s term "the Establishment," while Sciascia merely calls it "the impenetrable form of a concatenation" that, through its power, "works steadily greater degradation."

"All my books taken together form one," Scialabba quotes Sciascia from elsewhere, "a Sicilian book which probes the wounds of the past and present and develops as the history of the continuous defeat of reason."

This is starting to sound familiar.

Eric Grunwald is writing a novel.