Novelist, essayist and radical politician Leonardo Sciascia was known during his lifetime as the "conscience of Italy" for his unflinching censure of Italian society, its law enforcement, politics and mafia influence. A Simple Story shoots at his customary targets, but castigates them in a more playful fashion than in most of his works.

The volume comprises two short novellas, the first of which, written shortly before Sciascia's death in 1989, is the "simple story" of the title; however, like most stories that commence with the discovery of a body, it is far from simple. The unlikely looking suicide of a diplomat is swiftly followed by two murders, an art theft and a police superintendent behaving very oddly, while the callow sergeant trying to piece together the truth is met by obfuscation at every turn.

Just 40 pages long, it's a pithy murder-mystery with a denouement that, though satisfying, remains somewhat inconclusive, as befits the author's notorious scorn for the Italian justice system. Throughout, the influence of Sciascia's fellow Sicilian Luigi Pirandello is clear, as all too real fury is transmuted into drollness. This arch tone continues in the second novella, "Candido", a take on Voltaire's Candide, which first appeared in 1977. The hero Candido is sanguine and guileless, but his circumstances are far from utopian: born in a cave in Sicily during a bombing raid, his father a perfidious lawyer and his mother a fascist general's daughter who deserts him for her new man, he is unloved and surrounded by communists, fascists, priests and peasants who have nothing but corruption in common. The story is as sprightly as its hero, but Sciascia afterwards notes lugubriously that he failed in his ambition to emulate Voltaire, finding it impossible to satirise optimism when "our times are heavy, very heavy".

The Sicilian writer's last work of fiction is an ostensibly standard police procedural in which a country sergeant is given the dreary task of recording a suicide which, on closer inspection, grows rather sinister. This is simple in the sense that arte povera is simple: Sciascia's palette is so restricted and the weight of what's unsaid lies so heavy that he creates a kind of fictive omertà between narrator and reader. Which is, of course, the point: can any Sicilian death by gunshot really be that simple? And if not, can the truth ever be spoken? The poise and understatement of this writing is peerless. Sciascia's novella Candido (a riff on Voltaire rather than a reworking) is thrown in for good measure. If anything, the satire is even drier in this tale of a self-sufficient and straightforward individual trying to find his way through a postwar forest of competing ideologies, whether fascist, communist or clerical . . . although corruption knows few boundaries. Not surprisingly, our hero emigrates, much like the scornful peasants he attempts to befriend. Sciascia here is clever, cynical and very droll.