Peter Robb’s superb book Midnight in Sicily is a sensuous tour of Sicilian food, art, and urban life. Organized crime, its ostensible subject, lurks in the background — the dark alleyway behind the piazza of the setting. Yet, at least in 1996, when the book was published, Robb could mention the Mafia. For much of the 20th century, few people acknowledged that Cosa Nostra even existed. One of the exceptions was the crime novelist Leonardo Sciascia.

Sciascia, the tireless literary critic Frank Kermode wrote in his admiring afterword to Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl, was “a very unusual crime story writer.” Most authors of crime fiction write about criminals who are not real for the sake of an audience that pretends that they are real. Sciascia, on the other hand, wrote about real criminals for an audience that was liable to pretend that they had been made up.