The Precious Right to Read a Murder Mystery

I thought this bit was worth passing on to people!

the last mystery story to be published in Italy--at least so long as the Mussolini regime functions

In 1939 the American detective novelist Todd Downing wrote an Oklahoma friend an interesting letter in which he mentioned that his acclaimed 1934 detective novel The Cat Screams "is to be the last mystery story published in Italy--at least so long as the Mussolini regime functions."  According to Downing, the Milan publishing firm of Mondadori had bought the translation rights to The Cat Screams "just before Mussolini issued his decree, and they rushed it into print just under the wire."

Hitler may have loved Edgar Wallace,
but apparently Mussolini  was not a mystery fan

Downing's friend was highly incensed:

[I]t would seem mystery stories belong to the literature of "escape"....So, no more sleuthing, vicariously, for the Italians.  They will be restricted to a literary diet of hero-worship with the fascist big shots in the leading roles, deification of the ancient and modern Italian great, speeches by Mussolini, and novels on the various regions of Italy and her colonies, with the emphasis on the greatness and goodness of everything Italian and the meanness of everything foreign.

For his part Downing confessed that it struck him "that taking a people's detective stories away from them is just about the farthest north of something."

I agree with Todd, as he so quaintly and colloquially put it!  So, when you read your next Golden Age detective novel, you'd better appreciate it, even if it's a mediocre one! Just imagine having your reading limited to Mussolini hagiographies!

Todd Downing:
"Taking a people's detective stories
away from them is just about
the farthest north of something."

I know I get some Italian visitors to this blog and I would love to hear more from them (or anyone else of course) on this subject.  I also read (in Guido Bonsaver's Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy) that Mondadori declined publishing Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None the same year it published The Cat Screams, 1939--not because the former book was a mystery, but because it contained two impossible-to-delete suicides (and the Regime considered the depiction of suicide demoralizing).

filmed in the United States during World War Two,
but unpublishable in Italy

So was The Cat Screams really the last mystery published in Italy, at least until after World War Two?  I would love to see a copy!