To Each His Own

Pharmacist Manno receives an anonymous letter, assembled from words clipped out of a newspaper and signed only with the Latin motto 'unicuique suum,' to each his own, threatening his life, and when he and his hunting companion Dr. Roscio are shot dead soon after, the whole town assumes the letter explains the killing: an old vendetta against Manno, a womanizer with enemies of his own making. Sciascia's real subject is exactly this assumption's convenience, everyone in town has a version of the murder that requires nothing further from them, and the version that gets believed is the one that costs the fewest people anything.

Paolo Laurana, a mild, socially awkward schoolteacher with no official standing to investigate anything, starts pulling the thread almost by accident and finds that the letter, the ostensible reason for Manno's death, was never really about Manno at all: Dr. Roscio, the hunting companion everyone assumed was collateral, was the actual target, murdered to cover an affair between his wife and a powerful local lawyer with connections reaching into the mafia's political arrangements. Laurana's amateur method, patient, literal-minded, wholly without institutional protection, is Sciascia's ironic answer to the professional investigators who never come close: only someone with nothing to lose in the town's power structure would keep pulling once the convenient answer was available.

Laurana's breakthrough comes from tracking the Latin phrase on the threatening letter to its source, a gravestone inscription, and matching the clipped typeface to a specific missal only a handful of people in town would own, a piece of genuinely deductive, old-fashioned detective work Sciascia stages with real procedural pleasure even as he makes clear the town has no interest in where the deduction leads. The letter, meant by its author to look like the reason for the killing, becomes instead the one piece of physical evidence precise enough to unravel the killing's actual reason.

No one in the novel ever tells Laurana directly to stop asking questions: the town's resistance operates entirely through polite evasion, unfinished sentences, and a lawyer, Rosello, who remains charming and helpful right up until the investigation reaches him specifically. Sciascia's version of omertà is quieter and more total than an explicit code of silence, a social fabric that simply declines, at every level, to notice what it would be inconvenient to notice, which makes the eventual outcome feel less like a conspiracy than like weather.