Urban Mobility and Technology in Carlo Lucarelli’s Almost Blue

Pezzotti proposes that in the Italian crime fiction tradition, Carlo Lucarelli’s crime novels stand out for a problematisation of the detective’s mobility in the city. Through an analysis of the representation of Bologna as a postmodern and uncanny city and the relationship of the two main detectives—a young policewoman discriminated against in a male-dominated environment and a man with a disability—with the urban space, Pezzotti investigates how in Lucarelli’s Almost Blue (1997), the two protagonists eventually manage to control a network of interactions in an otherwise unknowable city through technology. The chapter makes the case for the subgenre of urban crime fiction as a powerful form of analysis of postmodern urban mobilities, an aspect still underexplored in crime fiction studies.