There is a mystery about Leonardo Sciascia, the Sicilian writer who in The Day of the Owl (1961) first exposed in fiction the workings of the Mafia and went on to become one of Italy’s best-loved and most famous authors. Why is it that, almost thirty-five years after his death, he remains a revered figure in his own country, known to every literate Italian, with streets, schools, foundations and journals named after him, while in the English-speaking world his name means very little?

Sciascia was from Racalmuto, a small village in western Sicily not far from Agrigento with no running water or electricity. He was born in 1921, just as Mussolini was coming to power. A short, rumpled, humorous man, he was uninterested in money or prizes, famously silent in company but very close to friends and family. He died in 1989, shortly before Milanese magistrates, known as mani pulite (‘clean hands’), put an end to decades of corruption in high places. He saw Fascism rise and fall, Germans occupy Sicily, fierce fighting after the arrival of the Allies in 1943, destitution and lawlessness at the end of the war, and the economic turmoil and political violence of the 1970s and 1980s. For almost all of his adult life, the Christian Democrats, a party he loathed for its subterfuges and sense of entitlement, were in power. He was briefly a member of parliament for the Radical Party. Most importantly, in Sicily – which he left only reluctantly, usually to travel to Paris, home of the Enlightenment philosophers he loved – he charted, condemned and wrote about the ever-stronger grip of the Mafia as it corrupted every facet of daily life. Many of the brave magistrates, journalists and politicians who were assassinated were friends of his.

Sciascia wrote about all this not simply in his fiction but also in what he called inchieste, investigations into forgotten episodes of history that he felt had been wrongly interpreted or too little understood. At one time or another he was an essayist, a literary critic, a historian, a pamphleteer