Leonardo Sciascia, the Sicilian detective novelist, essayist, playwright and pamphleteer, died in Palermo, Sicily’s capital, in 1989, at the age of 68. He is little known in the English-speaking world. However, Caroline Moorehead’s A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul, published in February, provides a valuable introduction to a writer who decried Mafia-related extortion and cruelty in all its grim variety.

Sciascia’s superlative thriller Equal Danger, published in Italy in 1971 as Il contesto, presaged the Red Brigades’ reign of terror during the 1970s, when Italy was convulsed by a series of bomb attacks and Mafia-backed political kidnappings. A police commissioner called Rogas pursues a murderer of judges; many are suspected, but in the end Rogas is defeated. ‘Your profession, my dear Rogas, has become absurd’, says the sinister President of the Supreme Court (played by Max von Sydow in Francesco Rosi’s 1976 film of the novel). Inspector Rogas is subsequently eliminated by unnamed parties; Sciascia’s is a thriller without a solution.

I was 24 when I met Sciascia in Palermo. The year was 1985. His study was hung with paintings and sketches by the artist Renato Guttuso, a fellow Sicilian. Sciascia told me he collected Arthur Rackham prints. (‘I buy books illustrated by Rackham whenever I can, even if they only mention Rackham by name.’) He gestured me to a chair and asked after my train journey from Rome, one he took regularly as a deputy to the National Assembly (representing Italy’s maverick centre-left Radical Party), and, later, as a member of the European Parliament. Over coffee, Sciascia spoke in Italian (he had fluent French but not-so-fluent English) about his abiding love of detective fiction. ‘André Malraux said somewhere that William Faulkner had introduced Greek tragedy into the detective novel. I like to think that I’ve introduced a sum of Pirandellian ambiguity – of uncertainty, if you like – into the genre.’ Luigi Pirandello was himself Sicilian; his novels and plays, for all their modernity, are deeply rooted in small-town Sicilian life, where deceiving masks are worn in public and, in Sciascia’s jaundiced view, pretence is reckoned a virtue.

To a degree, Sciascia’s refashioning of the classical detective novel was a provocation in Italy. The giallo (so-called because the first Italian crime fiction came in yellow, giallo, dust jackets) had been unofficially banned under Fascism as a suspect American import. When Sciascia started out as a writer in Sicily in the late 1940s, the giallo was synonymous with the cheap holiday reading on sale at railway station kiosks. Sciascia estimated to have read ‘at least 300 gialli’ in his lifetime. Among the hard-boiled American writers he devoured as a young man was Dashiell Hammett, whose private eye Sam Spade prowls San Francisco in search of hoodlums. Sciascia’s debut crime novel, The Day of the Owl, from 1961, owed as much to Hammett’s pulp gumshoe as to Pirandello. It is widely regarded as the first serious portrayal of the Mafia in fiction anywhere.

Though Sciascia set almost all his books in Sicily, he was no less regional a writer than Pirandello. Sicily functions in his work as a microcosm of Italy, revealing a wider system of Mafia corruption. It was Goethe, as Sciascia reminded me, who wrote from Palermo in 1787 that ‘To have seen Italy without seeing Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all. For Sicily is key to everything.’

Sciascia’s heroes are policemen, carabinieri, professors and lawyers; as honest administrators of justice, they uphold the Enlightenment ideals espoused by Alessandro Manzoni in his 1827 novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) – a key influence on Sciascia. Captain Bellodi in The Day of the Owl, a model Sciascian investigator, is a policeman from Parma, where he had fought in the anti-Mussolini resistance. A cynical capomafia dismisses him as a prejudiced Northerner who ‘sees the Mafia in everything before they even get off the ferry boat’. In the end, Bellodi goes back to Parma musing bitterly on Sicily and the Mafia; his investigations have come to nothing. Even today, many Sicilians deny the Mafia’s existence; or, Sciascia said, they exalt the Mafia as a ‘sort of benevolent freemasonry – an association for mutual aid’.

If there is very little fiction in Sicily on the Mafia, one great Sicilian novel speaks of the Mafia obliquely. Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958) portrays the rise of organised crime in Sicily as a form of transference of power from the aristocracy to a new landowner class presided over by the gabelloto (a sort of tax collector). Set in Risorgimento-era Sicily during the 1860s, the novel contrasts the money-grubbing gabelloto Don Calogero with the unworldly Prince Don Fabrizio, who has become so impoverished that he has to sell off his feudal lands to the highest bidder. Don Calogero, a bourgeois proto-Mafioso, buys up the lands for a derisory sum while acting as a local power broker. Such practices later developed into labour racketeering and loan-sharking.

Though Di Lampedusa does not mention the Mafia by name, The Leopard illustrates the theory that the Mafia was the product of a bourgeois revolution – the only such revolution Sicily had. ‘But perhaps bourgeois is the wrong word’, said Sciascia, ‘as Karl Marx defined the bourgeoisie as a productive class whereas the Mafia, until recently, functioned as a parasitical intermediary between the citizen and the State. Today, the Mafia has become lethally productive; it produces heroin and has become a multi-national capitalist network with operations not only in Sicily and mainland Italy but in Europe and the United States as well.’

Sciascia, who grew up in the 1920s amid the rural Mafia, knew little about the new urban phenomenon that killed in broad daylight with Kalashnikovs. ‘In my hometown as a boy I knew the Mafia bosses personally but today nobody knows where or who the nuova Mafia are; they’re as invisible as they are invulnerable.’

In 1982, the Mafia brutally murdered General Alberto dalla Chiesa, a Prefect in charge of Mafia investigations, and his wife Emanuela Setti Carraro. At the murder scene in Palermo there was a scrawled message: ‘Here died the hope of honest Palermitans’ – words that came to symbolise a dark moment in Italy’s fight against the Mafia.

As a gift, Sciascia presented me with a wafer-thin book he had published earlier that year in Palermo. It was an essay on the anti-Fascist Sicilian literary critic and journalist Giuseppe Antonio Borgese. In his neat handwriting Sciascia wrote a dedication in the flyleaf: ‘A Ian Thomson, ricordo di Leonardo Sciascia, Palermo, 7.xii. 1985.’ Back in London a week later, I found a first edition of Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘Goblin Market’ illustrated by Arthur Rackham, and sent it to Sciascia. His letter of thanks is one I treasure. ‘I am most grateful to you. That you remembered my love for all things related to Rackham, I consider a sign of particular attention and friendship.’ Sciascia invited me to stay with him and his wife at their country retreat in Agrigento province, not far from Pirandello’s house and the valley of the Greek temples. But then, suddenly, he was very ill.

Sciascia died four years later after months of painful dialysis. My translation of three of his books appeared in the UK shortly afterwards in the volume Death of an Inquisitor and Other Stories. Manzoni is the model for these investigative tales which unfold in the form of judicial enquiries or inquests into murky backwaters of Sicilian history. I promessi sposi, Manzoni’s historical novel of injustice in 17th–century Lombardy, was based partly on archival documents. ‘The real causes of crimes committed in the name of laws and institutions are not confined to a particular age,’ Manzoni wrote – a conviction that informs almost all of what Sciascia wrote. One of the books I translated, The Witch and the Captain, chronicles the trial of an Italian serving-girl burned at the stake in Lombardy in the early 1600s on a charge of witchcraft. Sciascia wrote it on the bicentenary of Manzoni’s birth in 1785.