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In the opening chapter of Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano describes the arrival of shipping containers from China loaded with dead bodies spilling out in the port of Naples. “The hatches, which had been improperly closed, suddenly sprang open, and dozens of bodies started raining down. They looked like mannequins. But when they hit the ground, their heads split open as if their skulls were real. And they were.” Just a few lines later, Saviano reveals his source: “The port crane operator covered his face with his hands as he told me about it, eyeing me through his fingers. As if the mask of his hands might give him the courage to speak. He’d seen the bodies fall...” (2006:3-4). This example illustrates how, throughout his personal journey into the realm of the Neapolitan-based organized crime system called Camorra, Saviano does not distinguish the author’s subjective gaze from that of his unofficial sources. Instead, he creates an eye/I dynamic, that is, an oscillation between centered and autonomous subjectivity. The incorporation of unanticipated viewpoints such as that of the port crane operator allows Saviano to break the boundaries between the journalistic inquest, a whistleblower’s account, and the political pamphlet. To embrace multiple identities is an ethical position, a rejection of a politically correct point of view on the Italian Southern Question. Portrayed as an open, infected wound, the port of Naples constitutes a perfect location for revealing the global dealings of the Camorra. Such a setting is revelatory of the influence of American film noir and hard-boiled literature on Saviano. Recent studies by Gyan Prakash and Edward Dimendberg1 have discussed film noir’s preoccupation with the urban landscape and dystopic images of the modern city. The liminal space of the port is topical in the history of noir: from the arrival of the freighter La Paloma in San Francisco’s dock in The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) to films such as Port of New York (Laslo Bendek, 1949), to more recent neo-noirs such as The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995). The link with a noir imaginary is the peculiarity of Gomorrah and possibly a key factor in its success when compared to the large body of nonfiction reportages or academic books on organized crime. While a book on the Camorra would typically sell between 5,000 and 10,000 copies and rarely crossed the regional borders of Campania, Gomorrah became an instant bestseller translated in over fifty languages. On a contextual level Gomorrah is not radically different from previous books on the topic, which describe the illegal trafficking of the Camorra in similar ways. In fact, Saviano was accused of plagiarism in 2009 by freelance reporter Simone di Meo and by the local newspaper Corriere di Caserta (and then acquitted by the Naples courts the following year). Caught in the fiction vs. nonfiction debate on the nature of the book, critics overlook the author’s stylistic choice of narrating actual events by adopting the language of global noir. The influence of noir on Saviano is clarified and even accentuated by Matteo Garrone’s cinematic adaptation of Gomorrah. Garrone stated in numerous interviews that he first experienced a sinister attraction to the hyperreal ‘images’ that the book presents, such as the Chinese bodies with open skulls looking like mannequins, and only later became preoccupied with Saviano’s overall analysis of the crime system. While the book is an epic attempt at describing the larger-than-life apparatus of an all-invasive conspiracy, and to Saviano, Garrone, Gomorrah: Neorealism and Noir in the Land of the Camorra