'The noir novel asks profound questions about morality. It’s a subversive genre,' says Italian crime-writer Valerio Vares

He is best known here, however, for his sinisterly atmospheric, cunningly plotted, literary crime novels featuring Parma-based Commissario Soneri, also the protagonist of one of Italy’s most popular television mini series, Nebbi e Delitti (Fog and Crimes).

Soneri made his debut in 1998 in Varesi’s first novel, Latest News of an Escape (1998), which has not been translated into English. It was inspired by a news story, about the sudden disappearance and murder of a family that he covered as a journalist, although he insists that there is little connection between his fictions and the facts he deals with in his day job.

A cigar-smoking widower and bon viveur, the sophisticated Soneri is Parma-based, as is his Turin-born creator. Like all fictional detectives – despite having a seductive, strong-willed girlfriend whom Varesi’s female readers either love or loathe – he’s deeply troubled as he goes down those mean piazzas. Which are invariably cloaked in immobile blankets of fog “as thick as bechamel sauce” or a mysterious murk of mist – meteorological features of Parma and the Po valley, points out 56-year-old Varesi.

His latest noir novel, A Woman Much Missed, reveals much more about Soneri’s existential angst and chronic indecisiveness, particularly his torment over his late wife, Eva’s secret past. It’s the fourth of the Soneri novels to be vigorously translated into English by Joseph Farrell, who acts as our interpreter when we meet in an Edinburgh hotel.

River of Shadows, Varesi’s first novel to be published in English, had reviewers comparing him to Dickens while, in this newspaper, Rosemary Goring described the Italian novelist as “the long-lost heir to Caravaggio.” The book opens with a gripping, Dickensian description of relentless rainfall as the river bursts its banks. It was followed by The Dark Valley and Gold, Frankincense and Dust.

In A Woman Much Missed, set a few days before Christmas in a wintry miasma of mists, Soneri investigates the murder of an elderly woman who owned the student guesthouse, where many years earlier he fell in love with Eva. Slowly, the traumas of the past, both personal and political, return to haunt him.

Towards the end of this sombre, affecting story – shot through with lightning flashes of sardonic humour – Soneri thinks, “The investigation had been from the very beginning an enquiry into himself, conducted relentlessly, allowing for neither concessions nor omissions, but now weighing on him like a life sentence.”

Varesi explains: “This is the only book in which Soneri confesses and faces up to himself. It’s like a post-mortem into his psyche. He is excavating his own past as well as investigating the ideological past of a generation – ‘the 1968ers’ and their belief in a revolution that was current at that time. So in A Woman Much Missed I am looking at the death of ideologies, that sense of political disappointment. I like to write about political intrigue, both local and national, because the noir novel is really a social novel now, asking profound questions about morality. It’s a subversive genre.

“My Soneri novels are not whodunnits; I prefer to call them whydunnits in which I hope to create a mosaic of Italy. Just look at Italy’s record of unsolved crimes! I think I am a very Christian writer, not that I have a religious faith – I’m an agnostic – but I choose to examine ethical values through Soneri. When I first conceived the character, I didn’t know it would become a series, but once I did, then I knew that I wanted him to grow and evolve, that here was a man who could develop and deepen – unlike, say, Maigret, who is always the same from one novel to the next.”

Almost always, though, Soneri is beyond the pall, so to speak. Varesi uses fog to symbolise the mystification caused by the endless obduracy and complexity of Italian law, as well as social and political anxiety, while murk becomes a metaphor for moral corruption and a lust for money and sex and power. “For every writer I believe the setting is fundamental. Soneri stalks the city of Parma like an animal in the mists, because, yes, fog obscures yet it assists the imagination. Without the fogs Parma would not be the city it is,” he says.

Indeed, Farrell jokes that the writer has almost single-handedly ruined the northern city’s tourist industry with his graphic descriptions of the sometimes vaporous climate – Varesi’s day job is covering environmental issues for La Repubblica, in which he claims “a certain modest expertise.” Farrell is only joking, of course. Indeed, before we part, Varesi urges me to extols the singular beauties of Parma, its art, music and cuisine – “the ham, the cheese!” Hence Soneri’s appetite for good food and fine wines.

Not that Varesi shares his gastronomic gusto. Despite being a devoted family man – he has a 21-year-old philosophy student son, Emilio, with his partner, Ivana – he writes obsessively and prolifically, like his literary hero, Georges Simenon. Although he prefers the French writer’s standalone fictions, such as Letter to My Judge, to the formulaic Maigret novels. “Simenon’s Italian publishers told me that when he visited, he asked for directions to the nearest brothel because he needed sex with a prostitute every afternoon to keep his creative juices flowing,” Varesi reveals.

At which point, the three of us ponder how Simenon ever found the time to write anything at all, given that he claimed to have had sex with more than 10,000 women. “Nonetheless, he wrote a lot – I find much of it inspiring,” adds Varesi.

Working so hard himself, he confides, causes “a lot of pain.” He sighs: “I am always under pressure to spend more time with my family, but I try to make this up to them with quality time. Such is the state of the publishing industry in Italy, I have to keep working. In Italy no one reads much, certainly not crime novels, so I can’t afford to give up journalism, not that I would want to.”

His own parents were “ex-peasants,” who lived in the hillside area of Parma. At the age of 16, his father became a partisan and was involved in spying operations. “After the Second World War, my parents moved to Turin looking for work. When I was three years old, my father had a serious accident at work – he lost one eye and the sight in his other eye was impaired – so we moved back to Parma. It was like two billiard balls striking and going off in different directions. If it had not been for that accident, we would have remained in Turin and maybe I would be working for Fiat today.”

Instead, he read philosophy at Bologna University, “which meant I had no guaranteed job at the end of my studies.” He maintains a punishing work schedule, rising at 7am every day, writing for three hours before going to his newspaper office. He gets home around 8pm, has “a frugal dinner,” then writes until midnight. As for weekends, he “sits down and writes.”

Finally, I ask Varesi whether he is Soneri — as Flaubert said of Madame Bovary, “C’est moi.”

“My own life can’t be imposed on Soneri's,” he replies. “But it is undeniable that there are a great many similarities – I use him as my way of looking at the world, at reality. He’s definitely not a typical policeman, but then not all policemen are standardised. The character is also born from a friendship I had with an actual Commissario. I think he’s happy with Soneri, but he’s a shy, reserved, introverted type. He sometimes turns up at book events, sits at the back, then slips out without ever expressing an opinion.”

Melting into the mists of those mean piazzas, presumably.

A Woman Much Missed, by Valerio Varesi (MacLehose Press, £14.99).