Equal Danger | Granta

  • Published: 02/01/2014
  • ISBN: 9781847089274
  • 129x20mm
  • 128 pages

Equal Danger

Leonardo Sciascia

Translated by Adrienne Foulke

District Attorney Varga is shot dead while picking a sprig of jasmine. Then Judge Sanza is killed. Then Judge Azar. Is this string of murders an individual vendetta or a more sinister plot? The charming Inspector Rogas is determined to find out. The pursuit of truth and justice are Rogas’s vocation, but his work is frustrated by a system which defies his understanding. He needs a key, a way in, a map, and he is sure that his chief suspect Cres can provide it…

The book, written in 1971, uncannily prefigures the Red Brigade’s subsequent killing of magistrates and the Catholic-Communist pact of the late 1970s in Italy. Developed under Sciascia’s hand in the spirit of a parody, Equal Danger has come to be regarded as a wide-ranging political thriller, one of the masterpieces of the genre.

This slender novel exemplifies crime-writing at its most sophisticated and polished

Daily Mail

Only very rarely can we say of such works [crime novels] that they look at questions of social justice with the informed eye of the intelligent artist. We can, however, make that claim for the stories of Leonardo Sciascia

Frank Kermode

The best evocation of the mafia in its birthplace in Sicily

Evening Standard

The Author

Leonardo Sciascia was born in Sicily in 1912 and died there in 1989. A master of lucid and accessible prose, Sciascia worked with deceptively simple forms – books about crime, historical novels, political thrillers – in order to engage with the moral and historical problems of modern Italy, especially his native Sicily. His books are rooted in a particular culture but speak to anyone who has ever wondered how people can endure unbearable injustice. Equal Danger was made into the film Illustrious Corpses by Francesco Rosi.

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