This course focuses on the origins and development of Italian detective fiction, from the first mass-market gialli published in the 1930s to the present-day popularity of Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano. We will explore how crime-writing is used to confront issues of justice, morality, politics, and regional identity in the Italian context, and how this genre conveys and questions ideas about knowledge, meaning, and “truth.” In addition to reading a selection of short stories and novels, we will also view film adaptations of several works in order to investigate the different functions and capacities of the detective story as cinema.