«What is known contains less terror than what is only whispered and fantasized». Despite the words that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle makes Sherlock Holmes utter in one of his most famous investigations, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), the dark lament of the beast that fills the nights of the Dartmoor moors, among sparse vegetation and marshes, quicksand, fog and sinister shadows could not better encapsulate the menacing essence of that part of the county of Devon in which it is set the novel. And even if in the end the Baker Street detective, defying local legends, manages to demonstrate that there is no demonic dog ready to attack the male heirs of the local house, the feeling that the inhospitable nature of the area best expressed his intentions malevolent precisely through that excruciating bark, he will struggle to abandon his readers for a long time.
Moreover, the intertwining of the stories that attempt to explore anxieties and fears, which from the individual dimension can become collective, resorting to the work of bizarre detectives to exorcise such fears or, on the contrary, make them evident, and the mystery inherent in nature, in its fearsome and wild aspects, as in its profile of indomitable unpredictability, it is much more consistent than one might imagine at first sight.
IT WOULD BE ENOUGH TO QUOTE two cinematic classics, in their own way attributable to the genre, such as Birds by Alfred Hitchcock (1963) e The Cape of Fear (Cape Fear), in its two versions, the original directed by J. Lee Thompson (1962) and the remake by Martin Scorsese (1993), to realize how the scenario in which the stories are staged does not only contribute to making them unforgettable, but it is an essential part of their intimate narrative structure. Bodega Bay, 100 km north of San Francisco, where the attack of thousands of birds that suddenly became aggressive and hostile towards humans was filmed, like the coastal locations of Northern California, Florida and the Savannah area , in Georgia, which served as the location for the films starring Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck, and Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte respectively.
Of course, it will be said, the natural scenario, in the cases cited as in many other works, both cinematographic and narrative, or drawn from one another, often serves above all to reflect the fragile or terrible face of human beings. The space of the wilderness often becomes a screen on which to project the wild image of men who transform themselves into hunters of other men, considering those who belong to their own species as prey. In any case, at that point, belying the pioneering confidence of scientific positivism of one of the first literary detectives, we will have to conclude that it is precisely what is apparently “known”, such as the natural space in which we move, that fuels our concerns much more than legends and fantasies that someone whispers in the shadows. And it is to be believed that by scrolling through some recent titles collected on the shelves under the heading noir or detective, Sherlock Holmes himself would at least partially revise his analysis.
As revealed by the title of the novel which in the United States was judged among the best detective stories of the year, In the silence of the woods (Neri Pozza, pp. 286, euro 19), it is the forests, and in particular those of the northern Appalachians, that define the place of crime in which the Pennsylvania writer and poet Kimi Cunningham Grant makes her characters move. An Afghanistan veteran and his eight-year-old daughter live in a wooden house in the middle of the woods, without electricity or contact with the outside world. To keep the little girl company, there are some books on animals and poems by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman that she recites by heart. What resembles a voluntary exile, however, is also a guarantee, an attempt to protect oneself from threats that evoke the man’s military past and the aims of the family of the child’s mother, who disappeared shortly after her birth. The mountains and woods keep the two safe, but when a hostile presence manifests itself around them, that same idyllic scenario risks turning into a lethal trap.
The mountains of the Highlands, like the Hebridean islands, represent as many places of choice for the Glasgow writer, who moved to France some time ago, Peter May, author of The Isle of Lewis Trilogy (Einaudi) who made the harsh natural environment of northern Scotland the setting for a series of noirs that investigate the secrets kept by places and individuals. Neither The sound of ice (Einaudi, pp. 306, euro 18), detective Cameron Brodie, arrived from Glasgow, will have to shed light on the discovery of the body of a well-known investigative journalist in a glacier in the Highlands. While trying to understand which of the many inconvenient leads that the dead man was following could have been the basis of his violent end, Brodie remains stuck in a village, isolated for days due to a snowstorm, literally immersed in a reality in which he will discover , sometimes there are unwritten laws in force but with inexorable consequences.
NEXT TO THE SIZE political and social, on which authors such as Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson have worked so hard, and before them the couple formed by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Scandinavian noir has undoubtedly imposed a new emphasis on the relationship between criminal stories and natural spaces, favoring, as is obvious, contexts characterized by frost, snow, isolated and deserted spaces. But also, and this is perhaps less evident, the impact of a rural world, where crime has as much an impact as the cycle of the seasons, within the framework of a narrative canon developed largely within urban spaces, if not those of metropolis.
Ragnar Jónasson, writer and journalist from Reykjavík who is responsible for the successful series of Mysteries of Iceland (Marsilio), with Unnur’s dream (Marsilio, pp. 222, €18) completes the trilogy dedicated to the investigations of Hulda Hermannsdóttir, police inspector of the Icelandic capital, who in this case has to deal with some murders committed on a farm in the eastern part of the island. A place often isolated due to heavy winter snowfalls and where telephone lines and electricity have also recently been interrupted: «A place not suitable for human beings, not at that time of year», as one of the characters in the story admits .
Another Icelander, Snæbjörn Arngrímsson, after having published a series of mysteries dedicated to younger people, has chosen to address a more mature audience with a noir that is anything but banal, A castle of lies (Carbonio, pp. 350, euro 21). In the book, the atmospheres and bloody mysteries of the Icelandic sagas, on whose trail the writer Júlía and her husband Gíó move, who for this purpose reached the island of Geirshólmi, a few kilometers from the coast and the well-known “Whale Fjord”, they will end up having the upper hand on the couple. After an argument during a dinghy trip, all trace of the man will be lost, yet his presence will continue to manifest itself in some way.
FINALLY, INEVITABLY for a season of humanity marked by the devastating consequences of climate change even without going so far as to talk about the Anthropocene, even noir cannot avoid hybridizations concerning the structures of the Planet, as has already happened, and for some time for science fiction with the so-called Climate fiction.
Among the most convincing evidence of this trend can be counted Dog 51 (and/or, pp. 228, 18 euros) by the French writer and playwright Laurent Gaudé, already winner of the Goncourt. In a world devastated by pollution and the excessive power of multinationals, one of which has “bought” the whole of Greece to turn it into a landfill, police inspector Zem Sparak works in zone 3 of Magnapoli, shaken by acid rain and atmospheric cataclysms, while the other two areas into which the metropolis-world in which he lives is divided are protected by a glass dome. With a past in the libertarian movements, Zem has no choice but to take refuge in the visions provided by Okios, a technological drug that is as addictive as opium, to return to remembering the place where he grew up, the city of Athens and the surrounding nature, the space in which he lived and loved before interest and power transformed everything into a polluted desert.
After all, also the title of the book by Philip K. Dick from which Ridley Scott based it Blade Runner he wondered “if androids dream of electric sheep.”
