“History doesn't care about honor”: the mystery of the manuscript

It is not easy to understand how the atmosphere in which we lived during the twenty years of fascism was leaden and how in every sphere - work, friendship, even family - a heavy climate, marked by suspicion, prevailed. A suspicion fueled by the fear of being perpetually monitored, listened to, spied on. In any place, in fact, the long ears of the political police and the Ovra could be at work, the body that monitored the safety of the Duce and the regime more than anyone else.

It is this Italy, dominated by respectability, conformism and deletion, that Gian Arturo Ferrari sets his first detective story, "History doesn't care about honor" (Marsilio, 2024, Euro 15, pp. 128. Also Ebook ), a mystery that reconstructs one of the least investigated areas of the twenty years: the complex and sometimes ambiguous relationships between fascism and publishing.

In Ferrari's book everything starts from a mysterious manuscript. Luigi Bassetti, anti-fascist and editorial director of a large publishing house, never takes it away, he always carries it with him in a shoulder bag, he doesn't let anyone see it. He doesn't talk about it, except, but only in vague hints, with Donatella Modiano, his right-hand man at the head of the editorial secretariat and his lover. Bassetti doesn't know that Donatella has been blackmailed and enlisted as an informer by a high-ranking official of the secret political police, the commissioner. Who wants to know, at all costs, what is written in that famous book. And he's willing to kill to know it. But his determination will have to deal with Donatella's ferocious anger - animated by an increasingly determined will to get to the bottom, to know the truth and settle the accounts - and with the cunning of an unsuspecting man.

In the Milan of 1936, a city of intrigue and suspicion, where many have a double face and everyone is wrapped in a web of silence, Gian Arturo Ferrari constructs a fascinating investigation into the ambiguous relationships between those who publish the books and those who would like, more or less metaphorically, burn them. At the same time it evokes the spirit of an Italy in a double-breasted suit and a black shirt, stunned by the violence, propaganda and rhetoric of the regime, but in which those ferments and the desire for renewal that would be expressed after 1943 were already stirring.