You might have heard the word giallo related to certain 1960-1970's movies. But the word, meaning "yellow" in Italian, has been applied to fiction since 1929.
At the time one of Italy's biggest publishers, Milan-based Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, had different book series, some of them named after the color of their covers. When editor Alberto Tedeschi noticed how succesful the mystery genre was in UK and US, he decided to import some of those detective novels, beginning with S. S. Van Dine and Edgar Wallace.
The covers had a distinctive yellow color and an illustration framed in a red exagon, which was very soon replaced by a more effective red and white circle. Here you see the cover of volume one, Van Dine's The Benson Murder Case, in the original version and in a reprint. The series was called I Libri Gialli (the “yellow books”) and appeared in bookshops in 1929. "Each page a thrill!" said the covers, or "This book won't let you sleep!" Later on, they would glorify the detectives with blurbs such as "Philo Vance has no match" or "Poirot more brilliant than ever".
It was a new kind of literature for Italian readers and the word giallo instantly became symonimous with detective story and mystery novel.
Something similar would happen in France after the war, when publisher Gallimard launched the Série Noire with its all-black covers and its selection of hardboiled authors: when a French film critic called John Houston’s The Maltese Falcon a “noir film” the word noir finally acquired the meaning we know today in fiction.
Though in Italy the crime section in a newspaper is called cronaca nera (“black chronicle”), the world giallo would soon mean “mystery” and “unsolved murder” in real life too.
The kind of mystery fiction labeled giallo in Italy would vary through the decades, but we’ll deal with this in another post. Let’s go back to the origin.
The success of I Libri Gialli led Mondadori to add a new formula: in the 1930’s the novels were also republished at a lower price in newstands, in a magazine called I Gialli Economici, followed by short stories, crosswords and columns. Consider it a more sophisticated version of the American pulp magazines. The covers had still the yellow color and the illustration in the red and white circle.
Mondadori’s Gialli became a popular reading. Il Giallo Mondadori is still sold today in newsstands (and, in a different version in bookshops... not to mention ebooks), after over ninety years.
But the prevaling color in Italy was the black of the camicie nere, the black shirts of fascism which ruled Italy since 1922. Mussolini had started censoring news about crime in Italy: in such a perfect country, he claimed, there was no place for murder. No Italian was supposed to be involved in a crime and the censorship influenced detective novels too.
In the Libri Gialli edition of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, for instance, the names of Italian characters were changed and one of them became Brazilian.
When Italian writers started writing gialli, they inevitably clashed with the regime.
To be continued...
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