Fascist censorship and self-censorship in crime books of the 1930s

Abstract

The paper will discuss the huge circulation in Italy of translations of crime fiction during the fascism, trying to explain how they were affected by censorship. The focus will be on the translations of some of the most popular detective novels by the English “queen of crime” Agatha Christie which were translated in the thirties for the very first time, under the fascism, by the publishing house Mondadori. It acquired exclusive rights and became really successful in those years, especially thanks to the popularity of the crime series “Libri gialli” published from 1929 to 1941, until when the Ministry of Popular Culture forbid their selling for “moral reasons”. The analysis will point out how both fascist censorship and editorial reasons caused a relevant manipulation of contents in translation of crime books, leading to the printing of abridged and reshaped versions in which digressions, secondary descriptions or subplots were often cut off as well as passages considered dangerous from a moral or a political point of view. Until the early 1980s these versions were still in bookstores, then new translations were made trying to be more faithful to the original ones, but still today you can easily read them in libraries.