Special Feature · Issue 1

From odor as clue to the atmosphere of evil

Crime fiction looks closely. It observes bodies, rooms, photographs, traces, and movements. Investigation seems to belong above all to the eyes. Yet at many decisive moments crime enters the narrative through what cannot be seen: a trace of smell left in a room, the odor of a body, the air of a neighborhood, a stink that signals decay, fear, or violence.

Smell does not merely provide a realistic detail. It can become evidence, social judgment, atmosphere, and even a passage between the physical and the psychological. This is the field we might call an olfactology of crime: the study of how odors help construct knowledge, characters, and narrative worlds in crime fiction.

When Smell Becomes a Clue

An odor is a particularly ambiguous trace. It can remain after its source has disappeared, pass through a closed door, and signal a presence that cannot be seen. This makes it perfectly suited to investigative logic: it confronts the character with an effect and forces them to hypothesize its cause.

In more classical crime fiction, the smell of a substance, a perfume, or an environment can function as material evidence. But its narrative force also comes from its fragility: odor is difficult to preserve, measure, and communicate. A detective may have smelled something without being immediately able to name it. Investigation then begins in the space between perception and language.

De Angelis: Smell as Evidence and Social Sign

In Augusto De Angelis’s novels, smell helps classify environments and people, but it can also produce a genuine investigative inference. Perfumes, tobacco, closed rooms, clothes, and bodies place characters within a social geography; the smell of a substance or weapon can instead help reconstruct materially what happened.

“He smelled the exit hole. That revolver had certainly not been fired recently.”

Augusto De Angelis, Il banchiere assassinato, in Tutti i romanzi, L’Aleph, 2019, p. 194. My translation.

De Vincenzi’s gesture does more than create atmosphere: it turns perception into a verifiable conclusion. Smell remains close to the model of rational investigation, while preserving an intuitive component expressed by the recurring metaphor of “having a nose” for something.

Olfactory evidence is not neutral, however. It allows characters to know and, at the same time, to judge. Sensory description reveals what a society considers elegant, respectable, vulgar, or suspicious.

Scerbanenco: The City Enters the Body

With Giorgio Scerbanenco, the register changes. Smell no longer merely distinguishes individuals: it becomes the material of the city and physically affects the investigator. Sweat, alcohol, food, workshops, hospitals, poor rooms, and wounded bodies construct a Milan that is not simply observed but breathed.

“The sharp smell of grappa almost took his breath away.”

Giorgio Scerbanenco, Il centodelitti, Garzanti, 2009, p. 63. My translation.

The grappa stain remains a clue, but its sharpness also acts on the character’s body. Evidence is not registered from a distance: it interrupts breathing and draws investigation toward a more traumatic sensory experience.

Social criticism thus passes through visceral sensory experience. Decay is not an abstract concept: it clings to surfaces, lingers in rooms, enters the reader’s body. Smell reduces distance and prevents violence from being contemplated from a safe position.

Carrisi: From Body to Mind

In Donato Carrisi’s thrillers, smell can assume another function. It is not only a material trace or social signal: it becomes a threshold between physical presence, memory, fear, and obsession. A smell can announce something not yet visible, reactivate trauma, or make uncertain the boundary between what exists in the environment and what arises in the mind.

The mother’s perfume bottles become “essences of ghosts.”

Donato Carrisi, La casa delle luci, TEA, 2022, electronic edition. My translation.

The phrase does not simply identify a fragrance. It turns perfume into a residual presence: something physical points toward someone who is no longer present and makes a psychological, perhaps supernatural, reality perceptible while the text deliberately keeps it uncertain.

Smell is especially suited to this ambiguity because it is both concrete and elusive. It is produced by a real substance, yet its interpretation depends on memory and expectation. In the thriller, this doubleness allows odor to become a bridge between the physical and the psychological.

The Reader’s Body

Literature cannot materially emit the odors it describes. It must reconstruct them through words. To do so, it refers to sources — smell of blood, mold, gasoline — or borrows qualities from other senses: acrid, warm, sharp, sweetish. It uses verbs of movement: the odor invades, rises, lingers, envelops.

The reader completes the scene through sensory memory. We do not literally smell the crime scene, but we can simulate the experience by recalling familiar odors. The novel thus activates a body absent from the page but indispensable to reading.

Smell and Guilt

In everyday language we say that something “smells fishy,” that someone “sniffed out” a deception, or that a suspect “senses” danger. Crime fiction exploits this closeness between smell and intuitive knowledge. But it also confronts a risk: associating bad smell with guilt, poverty, or deviance can turn sensation into stigma.

Studying the olfactology of crime therefore means observing not only how smells help solve a case, but also what moral hierarchies they construct. Who smells pleasant? Who stinks? Which bodies are perceived as threatening? Which environments are condemned before the investigation even begins?

A History of Knowledge Through the Nose

From De Angelis to Scerbanenco and Carrisi, we can trace a transformation: smell moves from being primarily material evidence and a social marker to becoming a bodily experience of the city and, finally, an unsettling threshold between reality and psyche.

Crime fiction thus shows that investigation does not simply mean seeing better. It means listening, touching, remembering, and smelling. Crime leaves a sensory fabric; odor is one of its most evanescent traces, but precisely for that reason one of its most narrative.

This contribution develops, in an independent and accessible form, some issues addressed in: Perugini, M. (2026), “L’odeur du crime. Vers une olfactologie du roman policier italien”, Revue Odore, 1 | 2026. https://doi.org/10.66488/olsd8250.

Italian original →