Editor’s note: Italica Press has just published our new translation of Emilio De Marchi’s crime thriller The Priest’s Hat (Il cappello del prete), which we shamelessly promote in this post. The following is an excerpt from our introduction to the novel. If you’re looking for a ripping yarn, we invite you to enjoy this novel in paperback or e-reader. (Currently only the paperback and hardcover versions are available; we expect the Kindle edition to appear shortly.) The following is an excerpt of our introduction to the novel. The novel’s first chapter is freely available on its Amazon page.

The 1887 edition of the British magazine Beeton’s Christmas Annual featured a complete novel by a hitherto unknown writer named Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet. The novel introduced the world to an eccentric “consulting detective” named Sherlock Holmes, as described by his friend, Dr. John Watson.

Earlier that same year, mysterious posters had appeared on the streets of Milan showing only an enormous black priest’s hat. At about the same time, a drawing of a black tricorn hat started showing up in the pages of the Milan daily Italia, first without explanation and later with the caption, Il cappello del prete (The Priest’s Hat). This turned out to be the title of a novel by the 36-year-old Milanese writer Emilio De Marchi. It would appear in that paper in June and July of that year, in 43 installments.[1] The following year it appeared in the Naples daily Corriere di Napoli and in book form. 

Conan Doyle’s detective became enormously popular and has remained so among readers and cinema-goers all over the planet. De Marchi’s work, though a popular success in Italy, never really broke through to the English-speaking world — although a translation was published in the U.K. in 1935.[2] Even in Italy today it is relatively unknown.

That is a shame, because The Priest’s Hat is endearing, suspenseful, moving, and wickedly funny. Loosely based on Count Alessandro Faella’s murder of the priest Virgilio Costa in Imola in 1881, The Priest’s Hat portrays the aging Neapolitan playboy Carlo Coriolano, the last baron of the once wealthy and powerful Santafusca clan. After squandering his inheritance, he is unable to support his taste for wine, women, cigars, and gambling. He is banned from his club and dependent on his loyal, long-suffering housekeeper for pocket change. And if he doesn’t soon repay a loan that he “borrowed” from an orphanage he administers, he’ll go to jail. But the baron of Santafusca hits upon a scheme that he thinks will neatly solve all of his problems: he will lure a greedy old priest, Don Cirillo, to his crumbling, mortgaged ancestral estate outside of Naples. The priest, who plans to buy the estate on the cheap from the desperate baron and then sell it at a huge personal profit to the archbishop of Naples, will be carrying a thick bundle of cash. The baron can kill him and dispose of the body on the grounds of his secluded villa. With the cash stolen from the priest, he can pay back his debt, stay out of jail, get his villa out of hock, and resume his life of elegant dissipation.

It’s no spoiler to say that he carries out his plan since, as in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), the murder takes place near the start of the story, and we know who done it. The suspense comes in Santafusca’s struggle to overcome his own fits of panic and dimly realized pangs of guilt and keep his sordid deed a secret.

Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov kills to prove to himself that he is above the common man in intelligence and courage. The baron of Santafusca, however, has no doubt of his superiority. It entitles him to kill to save himself from penury and public humiliation. He shares his name, Coriolano — or Coriolanus in English — with an ancient Roman aristocratic general, famously portrayed by Shakespeare, who held the plebeian classes in contempt. But the baron’s minor mistakes and oversights threaten to undo his perfect crime — as does a certain sinister-looking hat that keeps popping up in the most inconvenient places.

De Marchi proposed The Priest’s Hat as something like a bet among the Milanese intelligentsia. Italian newspapers of the time printed highly popular novels in serial form as supplements. These were usually translations of crowd-pleasing English or French novels and were considered lowbrow trash by Italy’s intellectuals.

In his brief forward to the novel’s publication in book form in 1888, De Marchi writes that “This is not at all an experimental novel, but an experiment with a novel, and should be taken as such.” He gives two reasons for writing it: firstly, to show that one needn’t go to France for a decent serialized novel “of moral benefit and common sense,” and that instead “we” (Italians) could “look to ourselves” for such a work; secondly, to show that the taste of the Italian reading public was being underestimated and underserved by the large Italian dailies and was deserving of a work of “vitality and honesty and reason.” He concludes his remarks by stating, “L’arte è cosa divina; ma non è male di tanto in tanto scrivere anche per i lettori.” — Art is a thing divine; but it doesn’t hurt, once in a while, to write something for the readers, too.

Thus he wrote this story for you, and my collaborator Cinzia Russi and I hope you enjoy it as much as we have.

[1] For the facts related to the writing and initial publication of The Priest’s Hat, I rely heavily on Renzo Cremante’s excellent introduction to the BUR classici moderni edition of Il cappello del prete (Milan: RCS Libri S.p.A., 2015).

[2] Emilio De Marchi,  The Priest’s Hat, translation by F.A.Y. Brown (London: Heath Cranton Ltd., 1935).