To solve the crime, he must negotiate the street gangs, corrupt cops, and Mafioso of the crumbling projects, and battle the rising neofascist and fundamentalist movements. The chapter headings are a poetic shorthand for Montale’s real and existential struggle: “In Which the Most Honorable Thing a Survivor Can Do Is Survive”; “In Which at Moments of Misfortune You Remember You’re an Exile.”

Izzo, who died in 2000 at the age of 55, scatters his prose with song lyrics, poetry, and fantastic descriptions of the sun-dazzled, sordid city. The austerity of American noir is supplanted by every sensual delight Marseilles has to offer: beautiful women, perfectly grilled sea bream with aioli, copious amounts of rosé and pastis.

The novels of Leonardo Sciascia (1921–1989; pronounced “shasha”), recently released by the New York Review of Books Classics series, are the most elegant of the Mediterranean detective fiction. Sciascia’s writing owes more to Pirandello and Calvino than to Hammett or Chandler. Both lyric and ironic, his prose reveals a stratified Sicily, the island’s inhabitants embedded and held by each layer of sediment: church, family, political party, and Mafia. All are bound by a code of silence and resigned to the way things are, always have been, and always will be.

In The Day of the Owl, one of Sciascia’s best books, Bellodi, a “mainlander,” as the natives derisively call him, comes south from Parma to serve as captain of the carabinieri. He must solve the broad-daylight murder of a local businessman who resisted the Mafia’s demand for protection money. Eyewitnesses will reveal nothing, their faces “as if disinterred from the silence of centuries.” The local snitch, whose job is as much to mislead as to enlighten, meets with Bellodi. He gives him misinformation, thinking of “those other informers buried under a thin layer of soil and dried leaves high in folds of the Apennines ... staking their lives on the razor’s edge of a lie between partisans and fascists.” He is shot on his own doorstep.

In between chapters, anonymous dialogue — conversations unattributed but understood to be among politicians, Mafioso, and clergy — is a “Greek chorus” singing the party line: there is no Mafia, there is no collusion, outsiders will never understand.

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In the showdown between Bellodi and the reigning don, Bellodi does not grasp what he is facing: “Beyond the pale of morality and law, incapable of pity, an unredeemed mass of human energy and loneliness, of instinctive tragic will.”