I recently wrote a comment in Italian on the recent novel "Oscura e Celeste" by Marco Malvaldi, a prolific author of investigative stories. I won't comment here on the novel, since it is available only in Italian. But I am translating my comments on why it makes sense that the protagonist of this investigative novel is Galileo Galileo, cast as an early version of Sherlock Holmes.
There is a logic in the fact that Marco Malvaldi chose Galileo as the protagonist of this novel, cast in the Florence of the 17th century. Malvaldi graduated in chemistry, began his career as a researcher, and then devoted himself mainly to writing. But he remains a scientist and has recently written an essay on entropy (which I plan to read as soon as I can).
Now, the entity we call "science" begins with Galileo Galilei, remains relatively marginal for a couple of centuries, and then becomes the official ideology (or religion, if you like) of the Western world in the 19th century -- and still is. With the triumph of science there came its narrative version, the modern "crime" novel. It starts with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders of the Rue Morgue" (1841), but the genre literally explodes with Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes; the first novel of the series was published in 1886.
Sherlock Holmes is a crime investigator, but he is also the prototypical scientist. He is the first of a long line of characters of investigators, whether public or private, who unravel a mystery involving a crime of some sort on the basis of logic, experiments, and irrefutable evidence. They almost always succeed: that's what the rules of the game impose. But why so much success for a genre that didn't exist at all before the 19th century? It's because it could not exist until science became the official religion of the modern state. The detective novel as a glorification of science is a genre perfectly parallel to the lives of the saints in the Middle Ages as a glorification of the religion of the time, Christianity.
In both cases, detective stories and the lives of the saints, fantasy and the real world have little to do with each other. Of course, in judicial investigations, the Galilean method helps a lot, but it is seldom decisive. Read the story of Marta Russo's murder in Vittorio Pezzuto's excellent book " Di sicuro c'è solo che è morta" and you will understand what I mean. In 1997, a student at the University of Rome was killed by a stray bullet while walking on the university's campus. After years of investigations, the best that the entire Italian justice system could do was to condemn two bystanders without a shred of evidence, literally by popular acclaim. A form of lynching that was perfectly similar to the witchcraft trials of a few centuries ago. In the United States, there was the case of OJ Simpson and his wife's murder, similar in many respects.
Worse still, the Galilean method doesn't even work when applied to what should be its field, real science. Think of the recent COVID pandemic: every now and then, a new rule or mandate arrived, theoretically based on "science." Masks, closures, distancing, disinfections: what were they based on? Basically, on nothing, apart from the utterances of the expert on duty who claimed to speak in the name of science. Or think about climate change: you can bring all the evidence you want, but many will tell you that they don't believe it and that it's all a hoax. And there is no way to convince them.
We already knew that Sherlock Holmes never existed, but now we also know that he could never exist. So, with the ongoing decline of science, will we stop writing and reading detective novels? Probably yes. I hope so since I never liked the genre.
