One of the joys of contemporary crime fiction is the range of settings which criminals and their law-and-order counterparts get up to their activities in. While the mean streets of London, New York and Los Angeles and other big cities are still very much the "default" setting for so many authors, there are series set almost anywhere you'd care to name. Scandinavia, of course, is very much the fashionable location these days thanks to a certain Mr Larsson opening the floodgates for a host of translations, but it doesn't end there by any means.
Just as "tourist-friendly", perhaps, is Venice. The atmosphere created by the labyrinth of calli, campi and palazzi lends itself almost perfectly to a tense, noir-ish plot. While the city is visited by millions of tourists every year, its population of locals is in fact quite small, which also adds in creating tension, as everyone seems to know everyone else and walls have ears. This is the world of the American expat novelist Donna Leon and her detective, Commissario Guido Brunetti. About Face is Brunetti's 18th appearance, and the series currently extends to 26 novels - the Venice of About Face circa 2009 is a very different Venice to that of Brunetti's first outing in 1992's Death at La Fenice, unsurprisingly.
Leon is a long-term resident of Venice, and clearly loves her adopted home town. This love shows through even in her well-known refusal to have her novels translated into Italian (although they're available in most other major languages), which seems to stem from the fact that Italian law enforcement and politics don't tend to come out looking quite so good over the course of one of Brunetti's investigations. She is also a master at evoking the city itself, with About Face taking place over a week or so in an oppressive winter during which the weather obstinately refuses to snow. The city that many readers would be familiar with from long summer days is nowhere to be seen, and yet still very familiar.
A strong feature of Leon's novels is their anchoring in reality. Brunetti has an office in the real Questura di Venezia, which is in a real location not far from St Mark's Square (and in fact not far from a surprisingly good value hotel, but that's another story). The canals he walks beside are real, the hospital where autopsies are performed is real and so on. Even the food his wife Paola cooks for his family - lovingly described throughout the series - is authentic. So authentic is the series, in fact, that walking tours and recipe books have been prduced for die-hard fans. Truly, this is a case of life imitating art!
About Face begins in a customarily enigmatic manner. Brunetti and his wife have been invited to dinner by his parents-in-law, Conte Orazio Falier and his wife Donatella. During the meal, Brunetti is seated next to the strikingly beautiful Franca Marinello, who shares his love for classical literature and spends much of the meal discussing Cicero. The Conte takes Brunetti aside and asks him to find out any information he can about Marinello's husband, industrialist Maurizio Cataldo, as the two men are considering going into business together.
So far, so very Venetian. Many of Brunetti's cases begin without an explicit concern of illegality, again returning to the fact that everyone seems to know everyone in Venice. No sooner has Brunetti begun his unofficial investigations, however, than he is introduced to Maggior Guarini of the Carabinieri, who also needs some assistance regarding an informant who was murdered.
These two investigations form the backbone of the novel, and while it's no spoiler to say that they are connected, they aren't connected in anything like the most obvious manner, a trick that Leon has nearly perfected over her series.
While it's entirely possible to start the Brunetti series from anywhere, it is always useful to have at least a general outline of the supporting characters. As well as Brunetti's parents-in-law and his literature-academic wife (whose devotion to Henry James is a source of considerable humour throughout the series), Brunetti also has a son and daughter - although Raffi and Chiara don't play major roles in this novel.
The real charm of About Face comes from Brunetti's interactions with his colleagues. The idealistic Ispettore Vianello makes an appearance, although not as much as in other entries in the series, as does the incomparable secretary-slash-hacker Signorina Elettra, to whom Brunetti constantly turns for information about everyone from Cataldo to Guarini's informant (and Guarini himself). The cheerful insouciance with which Elettra is able to "find out" information from everything from the tax office to the Carabinieri is probably the major reason that Leon doesn't want to be translated into Italian, as this invariably leads to discussions about the ethics and morals of breaking (or at least bending) the law.
Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, the wildly egotistic overseer of the Questura also makes his customary appearances. Patta tends to be used as a comic foil throughout the series, but About Face takes a slightly more serious tone so we don't see as much Patta (or his offsider, Lieutenant Scarpa) as we might otherwise.
As well as providing a satisfying - and thoroughly unexpected - solution to an otherwise baffling series of events, Leon is careful to deploy her trademark dark humour about Italy to its full effect. Brunetti and Paola trade epigraphs from their favourite authors about politics, both concluding that these high ideals couldn't possibly work in Italy, for example. Chiara - who tends to the idealistic - also makes a memorable point when wondering what the consequences should be for having micro-particulates in the air "above the legal limit" (should people not be allowed to breathe?), only for Brunetti to explain that they live in a country where there tend not to be many consequences for people who break the law.
As should be well and truly obvious from the foregoing, I'm a big fan of Leon's work. Having read all the Brunetti novels to this point in the series, I can only say that this is as good as any of the others and I look forward to even more dastardly acts in the city of canals.
Five stars.
Monday, 16 January 2017
Thursday, 12 January 2017
Wilkie Collins - "The Moonstone"
A relatively common question in crime fiction circles is the identity of the "first ever" crime novel. Just as with many other notable "firsts", this is a question almost impossible to answer. People have been committing crimes in literature almost forever, and other people have been investigating them with varying degrees of success for just about as long.
One candidate for the first "Detective Fiction" novel, though, is The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Collins was a writer of the sort of Gothic-Melodrama which Victorian literature is full of - his earlier The Woman In White is often listed as a perfect example of that genre, as well as a relatively early thriller. Collins was a contemporary and friend of Charles Dickens, who published many of his early novels in his magazines. Indeed, my first exposure to Collins came courtesy of Dan Simmons' brilliant horror novel Drood, in which an opium-addled Collins (who took vast amounts of laudanum in real life) serves as narrator for a series of thoroughly unnerving events happening to both authors.
The Moonstone is, in many ways, an early detective story. We're given the customary "Golden Age" setting - large country house with a decent collection of servants as well as family members of what even Agatha Christie would refer to as "independent means", mysterious strangers, and so on - and a crime happens. The crime is investigated by the local police, to no real avail, before Sergeant Cuff is brought in to solve the mystery.
Where this then differs from what would become the "pattern" of detective fiction is that Cuff doesn't get the chance to solve the crime. At least, while he seems relatively certain of the criminal's identity, there is no gathering of everyone in the drawing room and the gradual unravelling of the mystery. Instead, the characters leave the estate under assorted clouds of suspicion and seem to do most of their own unravelling over a period of nearly another year.
What is also unusual here is that the crime isn't a murder, but rather a robbery of a gemstone - the titular one. While it's entirely possible to write crime fiction around almost any kind of crime (Sherlock Holmes, for example, investigated several burglaries, any number of kidnappings, assorted blackmailings and frauds as well as his more famous murders), murders tend to dominate novel-length detective fiction, albeit with other crimes involved as well (the murder during a robbery or because of blackmail, for example, is a relatively common crime).
The reasons for this seem to be that murder is simply more dramatic than most other crimes. The psychology of someone willing to kill someone else to achieve a given end is alien to - I would hope - most of us, and therefore much more interesting. Additionally, while a burglar can burgle any number of times, there's a lot more drama in the fact that "a killer is on the loose". Think of the number of murder mysteries which are enlivened by more than one death or even an attempt being made on the hero's life as well.
Collins' choice of robbery was of course made before a lot of these sorts of "rules" were established, and I should point out that the robbery leads to both a suicide and a murder, so the tension does escalate over the course of the plot. Additionally, given that he was writing for a Victorian audience, we have to remember that different sensibilities were in play. Yes, stories and novels existed glorifying all manner of criminals, but murder was certainly seen as a very heinous event at this time.
The other quirk of the novel, particularly in our time, is the handling of Sergeant Cuff - who was based, it seems, on the very famous Inspector Whitcher (see The Suspicions of Mr Whitcher), who had only recently been involved in the "Road Murder" which brought him considerable fame.
Cuff is essentially hired from the police force to investigate the robbery and then comes close on several occasions to being sacked and paid off when his investigations cut close to the bone. This makes very little sense these days, but the concept of professional "detective police" was still very new in the mid-1800s and the force's members were handled in precisely this way by those with the means to do so. Various exchanges among the characters also go to the fact that the police were seen as professional snoops with very low morals - in keeping with their antecedents as "Thief Takers" and so on.
Cuff is very clearly a "modern" fictional detective, though. His disdain for the methods of the local police is a clear antecedent of everyone from Sherlock Holmes on down, and his willingness to speak elliptically when explaining the significance of various clues sounds very much like Hercule Poirot and his spiritual successors as well.
Interesting though The Moonstone is, it doesn't work quite so well as crime fiction because of Collins' focus on the supporting cast. The best crime novels put the plot first and the characters marginally second (which is why we know a reasonable amount about the private lives of Hercule Poirot, Captain Hastings, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, but almost nothing about Chief Inspectors Japp or Lestrade who deal with them). Such character development as there is can come over a series of novels, for example, with most of the individual novel focused on the crime and its investigation.
Collins, writing from the Victorian standpoint, puts the characters well in advance of the plot. They are definitely believable characters - and in fact this is an epistolary novel, so there are several voices and most of them ring true. Two of the main figures, the servant Gabriel Betteredge and young Franklin Blake, are very well-drawn and their slightly differing views of the same events are a clever quirk of the novel. The extended section written by Miss Clack, a puritanical relative of some of the characters, is amusing in parts, although it perhaps goes on for too long.
All too often, though, we get lost in the minute details of the characters' lives, rather than the investigation of the fate of the Moonstone. This may be because the actual mechanics of the stone's robbery are rather uninspired (the reason for the robbery is interesting, but only lightly touched on, again most likely for reasons of the intended audience). The revelations, when they come, seem to be more of an afterthought than the reason for reading the novel in the first place.
In the end, this isn't a bad novel, taken purely as a novel with incidental crime fiction elements. Viewed as "the first English-language detective novel", it's also of more than historical significance. I can only give it a guarded recommendation, though, as what came after it took this template and expanded on it considerably.
2.5 stars.
One candidate for the first "Detective Fiction" novel, though, is The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Collins was a writer of the sort of Gothic-Melodrama which Victorian literature is full of - his earlier The Woman In White is often listed as a perfect example of that genre, as well as a relatively early thriller. Collins was a contemporary and friend of Charles Dickens, who published many of his early novels in his magazines. Indeed, my first exposure to Collins came courtesy of Dan Simmons' brilliant horror novel Drood, in which an opium-addled Collins (who took vast amounts of laudanum in real life) serves as narrator for a series of thoroughly unnerving events happening to both authors.
The Moonstone is, in many ways, an early detective story. We're given the customary "Golden Age" setting - large country house with a decent collection of servants as well as family members of what even Agatha Christie would refer to as "independent means", mysterious strangers, and so on - and a crime happens. The crime is investigated by the local police, to no real avail, before Sergeant Cuff is brought in to solve the mystery.
Where this then differs from what would become the "pattern" of detective fiction is that Cuff doesn't get the chance to solve the crime. At least, while he seems relatively certain of the criminal's identity, there is no gathering of everyone in the drawing room and the gradual unravelling of the mystery. Instead, the characters leave the estate under assorted clouds of suspicion and seem to do most of their own unravelling over a period of nearly another year.
What is also unusual here is that the crime isn't a murder, but rather a robbery of a gemstone - the titular one. While it's entirely possible to write crime fiction around almost any kind of crime (Sherlock Holmes, for example, investigated several burglaries, any number of kidnappings, assorted blackmailings and frauds as well as his more famous murders), murders tend to dominate novel-length detective fiction, albeit with other crimes involved as well (the murder during a robbery or because of blackmail, for example, is a relatively common crime).
The reasons for this seem to be that murder is simply more dramatic than most other crimes. The psychology of someone willing to kill someone else to achieve a given end is alien to - I would hope - most of us, and therefore much more interesting. Additionally, while a burglar can burgle any number of times, there's a lot more drama in the fact that "a killer is on the loose". Think of the number of murder mysteries which are enlivened by more than one death or even an attempt being made on the hero's life as well.
Collins' choice of robbery was of course made before a lot of these sorts of "rules" were established, and I should point out that the robbery leads to both a suicide and a murder, so the tension does escalate over the course of the plot. Additionally, given that he was writing for a Victorian audience, we have to remember that different sensibilities were in play. Yes, stories and novels existed glorifying all manner of criminals, but murder was certainly seen as a very heinous event at this time.
The other quirk of the novel, particularly in our time, is the handling of Sergeant Cuff - who was based, it seems, on the very famous Inspector Whitcher (see The Suspicions of Mr Whitcher), who had only recently been involved in the "Road Murder" which brought him considerable fame.
Cuff is essentially hired from the police force to investigate the robbery and then comes close on several occasions to being sacked and paid off when his investigations cut close to the bone. This makes very little sense these days, but the concept of professional "detective police" was still very new in the mid-1800s and the force's members were handled in precisely this way by those with the means to do so. Various exchanges among the characters also go to the fact that the police were seen as professional snoops with very low morals - in keeping with their antecedents as "Thief Takers" and so on.
Cuff is very clearly a "modern" fictional detective, though. His disdain for the methods of the local police is a clear antecedent of everyone from Sherlock Holmes on down, and his willingness to speak elliptically when explaining the significance of various clues sounds very much like Hercule Poirot and his spiritual successors as well.
Interesting though The Moonstone is, it doesn't work quite so well as crime fiction because of Collins' focus on the supporting cast. The best crime novels put the plot first and the characters marginally second (which is why we know a reasonable amount about the private lives of Hercule Poirot, Captain Hastings, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, but almost nothing about Chief Inspectors Japp or Lestrade who deal with them). Such character development as there is can come over a series of novels, for example, with most of the individual novel focused on the crime and its investigation.
Collins, writing from the Victorian standpoint, puts the characters well in advance of the plot. They are definitely believable characters - and in fact this is an epistolary novel, so there are several voices and most of them ring true. Two of the main figures, the servant Gabriel Betteredge and young Franklin Blake, are very well-drawn and their slightly differing views of the same events are a clever quirk of the novel. The extended section written by Miss Clack, a puritanical relative of some of the characters, is amusing in parts, although it perhaps goes on for too long.
All too often, though, we get lost in the minute details of the characters' lives, rather than the investigation of the fate of the Moonstone. This may be because the actual mechanics of the stone's robbery are rather uninspired (the reason for the robbery is interesting, but only lightly touched on, again most likely for reasons of the intended audience). The revelations, when they come, seem to be more of an afterthought than the reason for reading the novel in the first place.
In the end, this isn't a bad novel, taken purely as a novel with incidental crime fiction elements. Viewed as "the first English-language detective novel", it's also of more than historical significance. I can only give it a guarded recommendation, though, as what came after it took this template and expanded on it considerably.
2.5 stars.
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