Secondhand Vintage Italian Fratelli Fabbri Sottoaccusa Series SP2684

Secondhand Vintage Italian Hardback Box — Fratelli Fabbri Sottoaccusa Series (27 Books)

A remarkable near-complete collection of Fratelli Fabbri Editori's Sottoaccusa series, published in Italy in the early 1970s and now increasingly sought after by collectors of vintage Italian hardbacks and mid-century graphic design. The series ran two parallel strands — Serie Romanzi (crime and thriller fiction) and Serie Inchieste (docufiction examining real political crimes and historical controversies) — and this box draws generously from both. Authors include working journalists, established crime writers, and political historians, and the subjects range from Mussolini's fall to the assassination of MLK to the mysterious disappearance of a genius physicist. All books are in Italian. The covers, in the bold pop-art style characteristic of Italian commercial publishing of the period, are a vivid time capsule in themselves.

Serie Romanzi (Crime Fiction)

1. Inisero Cremaschi — Le mangiatrici di ice-cream (The Ice Cream Eaters) Cremaschi was one of Italy's leading genre fiction writers and editors, closely associated with Italian fantascienza and noir. An intriguing title from a writer who helped shape Italian popular fiction.
2. Domenico Paolella — Le ossa di zucchero (Bones of Sugar) Paolella was better known as a film director, with credits ranging from peplum epics to crime thrillers — this novelistic work reflects his deep engagement with the crime genre in both media.
3. Giuseppe Pederiali — Povero assassino (Poor Assassin) Pederiali was a prolific and popular Italian crime novelist whose work ran to dozens of titles; this early entry in his career shows the gritty, character-driven style that made him a staple of Italian popular fiction.
4. Giuseppe Bonura — Morte di un senatore (Death of a Senator) A crime narrative from a writer who doubled as one of Italy's sharper literary critics — the tension between serious literary sensibility and genre convention gives his fiction an unusual edge.
5. Gaetano Gadda — Il complice del suicidio (Accomplice to Suicide) A psychological crime narrative with a title that signals its preoccupation with guilt, agency, and the blurred line between perpetrator and bystander.
6. Vieri Razzini — Terapia mortale (Lethal Therapy) A thriller set in a medical context — Razzini was among the more reliable contributors to the Sottoaccusa fiction strand, and this is a compact, tightly plotted entry.
7. Massimo Grillandi — Un paradiso per morire (A Paradise to Die In) Grillandi was a prolific popular novelist across multiple genres; this title carries the sun-and-shadow glamour typical of Italian crime fiction of the period.
8. Sandro Caputo — Fuga dell'attentatore (Escape of the Assassin) The cover — a sniper's crosshairs over a distorted face — tells you everything about the tone: paranoid, political, and thoroughly 1970s Italian.
9. Enrico Vaime — Novanta di gradimento (Ninety Percent Approval) Vaime was primarily celebrated as a satirist and television writer — one of the great Italian humorists of his generation — which gives this crime fiction outing a distinctive sardonic flavour.
10. Luciano Anselmi — Il commissario Boffa (Commissioner Boffa) A police procedural centred on a recurring detective figure — a classic of the commissario subgenre that dominated Italian crime fiction from the 1960s through the 1980s.
11. Luigi Ferrante — Alibi veneziano (Venetian Alibi) Venice as crime setting: the lagoon city's labyrinthine geography and social insularity made it an irresistible backdrop for Italian thriller writers, and Ferrante uses it well.

Serie Inchieste (Political Docufiction & Historical Investigation)

12. Maurizio Chierici — Gli eredi dei gangsters (The Heirs of the Gangsters) Chierici was one of Italy's foremost investigative journalists, known for his reporting from Latin America and the United States — this investigation into organised crime's legacy is characteristic of his sharp, globally aware style.
13. Gian Franco Vene — La condanna di Mussolini (The Condemnation of Mussolini) Vene was a distinguished Italian historian and journalist; his examination of Mussolini's fall and judgment belongs to the serious popular historiography of Italian fascism that flourished in the early 1970s.
14. Massimo Felisatti & Fabio Pittorru — Gli strateghi di Yalta-1: La spartizione del mondo (The Strategists of Yalta-1: The Division of the World) Felisatti and Pittorru were one of Italian crime fiction's great partnerships, but the Yalta books belong to their more directly political work — a two-volume docufiction examination of the 1945 conference that redrew the world.
15. Massimo Felisatti & Fabio Pittorru — Gli strateghi di Yalta-2: Il seme della guerra fredda (The Strategists of Yalta-2: The Seed of the Cold War) The second volume follows the consequences of Yalta into the early Cold War — together the two books form an ambitious popular history of how the postwar world was made.
16. Paolo Pavolini — 1943, la caduta del fascismo - 2: La fuga dei Savoia (1943, the Fall of Fascism - 2: The Flight of the House of Savoy) The second volume of Pavolini's examination of Italy's pivotal year, focusing on the royal family's ignominious flight following the armistice. Note that volume 1 of this title also appears in the box (see entry 26).
17. Umberto Giovine — La piovra greca (The Greek Octopus) A docufiction investigation into Greek political scandal and organised crime — published in the shadow of the Greek military junta, this would have felt urgently contemporary to its first Italian readers.
18. Giorgio Bonacina — Le bombe dell'Apocalisse (The Bombs of the Apocalypse) Bonacina was a respected journalist and historian of the Second World War; this investigation into strategic bombing and weapons of mass destruction reflects the nuclear anxieties of the early 1970s.
19. Leandro Castellani — Dossier Majorana One of the series' most enduringly fascinating titles: an investigation into the disappearance of Ettore Majorana, the brilliant theoretical physicist who vanished in 1938 and was never found. The mystery — suicide? escape? faked death? — has never been definitively solved and continues to captivate.
20. Valerio Ochetto — I pirati della libertà (The Pirates of Freedom) Ochetto was a journalist and biographer; this investigation into political violence and resistance movements reflects the intense debates about legitimacy and terror that defined Italian political culture in this period.
21. Gian Franco Vene — Uccidete Lumumba (Kill Lumumba) Vene's investigation into the assassination of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba — murdered in 1961 with the complicity of Belgian and American intelligence — is a significant work of political journalism.
22. Vincenzo Mantovani — Bersaglio M.L. King (Target M.L. King) An Italian investigative account of Martin Luther King's assassination — published at a time when the full extent of FBI surveillance of King was still emerging, and questions about James Earl Ray's handlers remained wide open.
23. Walter Tobagi — Gli anni del manganello (The Years of the Bludgeon) Perhaps the most poignant title in the box. Tobagi was an outstanding investigative journalist who wrote extensively about Italian fascism and political violence — then, in May 1980, was shot dead outside his Milan home by the Red Brigades' Brigata XXVIII Marzo. He was 33. His early work on the history of political violence in Italy reads very differently in light of what happened to him.
24. Gino Sitran — Stalin e il terrore (Stalin and the Terror) A docufiction account of Stalinist repression — published just as Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago was reshaping Western understanding of Soviet terror, this would have been timely reading in 1974.
25. Guido Gerosa — Chi ha ucciso Ben Barka? (Who Killed Ben Barka?) Gerosa investigates the 1965 abduction and murder of Mehdi Ben Barka, the Moroccan opposition leader who was kidnapped in Paris with the apparent complicity of French intelligence and the Moroccan secret service. The case remains partially unresolved.
26. Paolo Pavolini — 1943, la caduta del fascismo - 1: Badoglio e C. strateghi della disfatta (1943, the Fall of Fascism - 1: Badoglio & Co., Strategists of Defeat) The first volume of Pavolini's examination of Italy's pivotal year, focusing on the generals and politicians who bungled Italy's exit from the war. Volume 2 also appears in this box (entry 16) — buyers receive both parts of the complete work.
27. Mario Signorino — Il massacro di Barcellona (The Massacre of Barcelona) An investigation into political violence in Spain — published during the final years of the Franco dictatorship, when memories of the Civil War and ongoing Francoist repression made this urgently relevant subject matter for Italian readers.