«Is it possible to write a detective story that does not exceed the length of a newspaper column, the equivalent of little more than two pages of typescript?»: the question was posed in 1981 by the editorial staff of «Il Mattino» in Carlo Bernari (Naples, 13 October 1909 – Rome, 22 October 1992), a collaborator of our newspaper at the time.
The writer-journalist, accepting the challenge, responded by proposing during that year, from April to November, sixteen short (some very short) stories fueled by daily crime news, configured as “legal thrillers”.
They are now published under the title Lightning yellows (Langella Edizioni, 96 pages, 12 euros), introduced by a writing by Enrico Bernari, son of Carlo, who provides very useful historical-critical information, conducted with agile acuity. Already in the works of the 1930s and 1940s, the author of Three Workers had shown that he knew how to entrust his narrative physiognomy to the structure of the “metaphysical mystery”, oriented – as the preface specifies – to the “denouncement of a fearful world made up of abuses and violence », «to reveal the hidden plots, the mysteries hidden under the façade of the presumed objective reality», well before, therefore, it became the expressive stigma of the Pasticciaccio ugly in via Merulana di Gadda.
It is a compositional method that confirms, once again, the impossibility of attributing Bernari to the neorealist code, to which he has also been compared by some critics. The year before the creation of the Gialli fulminanti, the author published Il giorno degli assassini, inspired by a brutal bloody affair, a triple murder which occurred in 1975 in Naples, in Via Caravaggio, for which he had been convicted in first instance Domenico Zarrelli.
An almost unique and paradoxical case, Bernari’s novel is used by the defense team (which underlines how it gives “a very notable contribution to the correct interpretation of the facts”) in the appeal phase of the trial and will serve to acquit the accused. The writer is even invited to explain his version of events in the courtroom, to which explicit reference will be made in the sentence which exonerates what had initially been pointed out as “the monster of Naples”.
In the year of the acquittal verdict, Bernari, accepting the invitation of the «Mattino» to edit a column of concise and lightning-fast crime stories, pours into it his passion for his idol Maigret.
In the stories drawn from the various misdeeds on which the most usual and eventful everyday life is plotted, the narrator, behind the guise of a real estate agent, gives life to his counter-investigations, configuring himself as a real investigator, willing «to make sudden movements from neighborhood to neighborhood, from environment to environment, passing from one camouflage to another”, which allow him to shed light, through minimal clues, on the truth of small and large misdeeds.
Thus, these fulminating detective stories were born, delivered in a synthetic and lively writing, as required by the restricted spaces that had been imposed on Bernari, which documents the ability to press and illuminate the variations of the surrounding brutality and thus arrive, surprisingly, at the heart of the things. The resulting speed also imposed on the reading time makes this booklet a pleasant unicum, a further piece of the plot of a singular writer to be rediscovered and relaunched.
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