If you have a look today in Italian newsstands, you might think little has changed here since the Sixties... and that would be great, if you love thrillers, western, science-fiction and everything I call "pulp" in this blog. And I don't mean "pulp" in an offensive way. Of course, if you don't like pulp, I guess you wouldn't be reading this post.
Let's start from the picture above, taken yesterday morning, April 7th, 2021, after I was back from my newsstand in the Niguarda neighborhood in Milan, Italy. You see the latest new monthly issue and special issue of Tex, Italy's bestselling comics since 1948: a western series by Italian authors, that was popular long before spaghetti westerns existed; its publisher, Sergio Bonelli Editore, which is now celebrating its 80 years, is the biggest comics publisher in Italy.
You see also the latest spy thrillers from Segretissimo by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore (where the world giallo for thrillers was born, as I explained here). The special issue contains two novels (one a reprint, the other a new one) of the Il Professionista series by Stephen Gunn, pen name of my friend Stefano Di Marino, who's been writing for over thirty years and has been Italy's top bestselling thriller author (not just spy stories) at least for the last decade.
The book by French writer Gerard De Villiers is a reprint of a novel featuring S.A.S. (not related to the British SAS), a series that makes the late De Villiers the world best-selling spy stories author, with over 100 million copies sold (source: The New York Times). A master of eurospy thrillers since 1964, he's written the biggest hits in over 60 years of Segretissimo, still succesfully reprinted in Italy.
The third book is my latest novel under the pen name François Torrent, first in the new series Sickrose, a spin-off of my series Agente Nightshade which I've been succesfully publishing since 2002. There's no bestseller list for books sold in newsstands, but I know they sell well, simply because the publisher would stop asking me for more if they didn't.
Stefano and I receive daily lots of messages and comments from readers on social networks. There's always great expectation for our next books. We're doing proudly the job we love and we were born for: entertain people with low price books but not just "cheap" books.
It might look as if Italians love thrillers, westerns and pulp literature and comics.
The truth is they hate them.
Because they are books.
After WWII lots of novels and comics reached the newsstands, getting to a peak in the 1960-70's. Bookshops were an important market as well, but newststands were everywhere and looking at a cover promising suspense and adventure was a daily temptation. Thrillers and science-fiction were mostly from UK and US, though a lot of mystery and spy novels came from France too. But there were many Italian-made comics and some of those created between the late 40's and the 80's have still a huge following today.
TV arrived in Italy in mid-50's - first one single channel, than two, than dozens of private channels in the late 70's - but people didn't stop reading. Gialli and comics were considered unfit for intellectuals, who usually despised popular fiction, with the exception of writers such as Umberto Eco (later author of The Name of the Rose) or Oreste Del Buono. Eco noticed how popular culture made culture closer to everybody, not just a privilege for a higher class.
Italian TV produced both sophisticated adaptations of classic novels from all over the world and original thrillers, such as the ones written by Biagio Proietti and Diana Crispo, who had 28 million viewers tuned on one of their mystery miniseries in the 70's (the same audience you'd find on a major World Cup match with the Italian football team).
Italian cinema showed how you could have directors like Antonioni, Bertolucci, Fellini or Petri, and at the same time masters of spaghetti westerns or giallo or poliziottesco, not to mention comedy. Besides, the huge money made by producers with popular movies helped them finance the less commercial ones. Some directors, such as Aldo Lado, could easily do both, with style.
But this perfect balance couldn't last forever. In the late 1980's, the competition between state-controlled (and tax-financed) RAI TV networks and private networks owned by Silvio Berlusconi's Mediaset led to a race... toward a lower level in television, entertainment and "culture". The distorted idea of marketing was not "give the people what they want", but "give the people what we decide they want, so they'll get used to have less".
New marketing "experts" were appointed by publishers too. Since many of them didn't read books, they were scared by the unknown and didn't know what to do with them, especially pulp books. Besides, success and money were the new religion, so why wasting time in something so "useless" as reading?
In the 2000's TV started promoting something that might be summarized as "Ignorance is strength", as Big Brother (Orwell's one) would say. Someone tried to sell Orwell's 1984 as "the book that inspired Big Brother on tv". Actually, the "heroes" of the Italian version of the TV show Big Brother were Italian girls and guys who could barely speak Italian and one of them proudly declared he never read a book, showing the audience that this was the key to success.
Sometimes Italian publishers inserted grammar mistakes in books, hoping to make them more palatable to readers who, actually, were no longer buying books, except perhaps some with a TV star on the cover.
Comics had the same destiny. Almost twenty years ago I was in a secondary school with other writers and one of them asked the students "What are your favourite comics?" The young ones simply didn't read comics. Or anything else, for that matter. And that was before everybody was making selfies on social networks.
There are still book and comics readers, of course. Many of them.
But if you enter now an Italian bookshop and look for what's new, you won't find the kind of stuff you might have found years ago. Only some TV stars left (conventional TV is dying, anyway) and a few mystery novels, but just of the kind currently approved by major Italian publishers.
Our kind of books is left to minor publishers which hardly survive and have a bad but expensive distribution in bookshops. You can find them on Amazon, of course, but Amazon - according to a theory circulating last Christmas among both radical-chic pseudo-intellectuals and right-wing nationalists - is some kind of foreign cabal whose main purpose is killing Italian bookshops and shops in general.
I must be extremely evil myself, since a few books of mine are mostly sold on Amazon.
Luckily, there are still newsstands. Not so many as it used to be, since people no longer buy newspapers daily. Sales are no longer so outstanding: in the 70's a thriller in Il Giallo Mondadori might sell up to half a million copies in just one week, now it's down to thousands in one or two months. But books by Stephen Gunn/Stefano Di Marino or François Torrent/Andrea Carlo Cappi (we write both with our pen names and real names) are still in the bestseller range.
This particular way of selling books and comic books has been saving pulp fiction (and its readers) even in the darkest hours, since newsstands were open during the worst days of pandemic lockdown.
Italy officially hates pulp, but, luckily for us, it hasn't been able to erase it completely.
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