Female Dicks. Gender and genre in Bolognese literary serials

Abstract

In honor of Luigi Bernardi ten years after his death, this essay explores one of the most important of the author-editor’s areas of research, crime fiction. Where the rich and recent scholarship on the subject has favored a more transmedial approach, I here focus on the literary text, specifically three series of novels set in and around Bologna with female detectives: the series by Carlo Lucarelli with protagonist police inspector Grazia Negro, the series by Grazia Verasani featuring the private detective Giorgia Cantini, and two recent novels in a projected trilogy by Lorella Marini whose protagonist is Commissaria Barbara Larsen Givoni. From these serial novels I distill a triptych of ‘female dicks’: the Deferential, the Disquieting, and the Avenger, each of whom responds differently to the exigencies of the patriarchal system in which they operate, each of whose series illustrate greater and lesser degrees of adherence to generic conventions of the noir, representing the intersection of gender e genre.