‘The Shape of Water’

Tags

Andrea Camilleri, Inspector Montalbano, Lunch, Poirot, Sicily, Venice, whodunits

Our creative writing teacher would have not have allowed us to interrupt the narrative simply to describe the meal our hero was sitting down to enjoy. No, no, I hear, you’re breaking the flow, this isn’t relevant to the plot, you’ll lose your reader.

I’ve just read my first Inspector Montalbano story. I’d seen a few episodes on TV and thought I’d try one of the books. And, sure enough, just as on TV he goes to his favourite restaurant and discusses the menu with his host, here we also break for lunch. And it’s great. We are, after all, in Italy. Lunch is important. A few years ago on an anniversary trip to Venice my wife and I had foolishly allowed ourselves to be transported to the glass island of Murano; we were fearful of how we could possibly escape the inevitable hard sell at the end of the tour without too much damage to our bank balance, but to our relief we were spared because it was LUNCHTIME ON SUNDAY. All the hard sellers just disappeared, and we slipped away unnoticed.

So eat on, Salvo. The nearest I can think of a parallel in English whodunits would be Poirot stopping his ratiocination to lovingly prepare a meal for Captain Hastings or Inspector Japp.

The Shape of Water, by Andrea Camilleri (translated by Stephen Sartarelli) is, as I’ve said, my first Montalbano. A complex and occasionally comic Sicilian whodunit. It wasn’t possible for me to work out the solution – we get the clues at the same time as the good Salvo himself (and sometimes afterwards). It was a quick read – with generous spacing on the page, and lots of dialogue. As well as lunch we get glimpses of Sicily, and a picture of corruption in local government and of the bureaucratic confusion of the various Italian law enforcement agencies. There are some helpful notes at the end explaining especially Sicilian and Italian references.

Silvio Luparello, a well-regarded engineer and local bigwig, is found dead of a heart attack in his car in the Pasture, a squalid area known for prostitution. Our hero smells a rat: Luparello had just three days before become Provincial Secretary, leader of the Council, and after years of careful politicking to achieve that dizzy (and profitable) height would not have risked his reputation thus. Pressure to close the case from the great and the good (including the local Bishop) only encourage Montalbano to continue his investigation.

There’s a complex cast of characters, including rubbish collectors, Mafiosi, journalists, various beautiful women, and other leading politicians.  One scene I especially enjoyed takes place in an abandoned chemical factory, both for the description of the place and for the comic action that takes place there. As the blurb says, “Picking his way through a labyrinth of high-comedy corruption, delicious meals, vendetta firepower, and carefully planted false clues, Montalbano can be relied on, whatever the cost, to get to the heart of the matter.”

A good read. I’ll read others. First published in 1994. English translation published by Picador.

Buon appetito!

‘Murder for Christmas’

Tags

Christmas, country house murder, Francis Duncan, Mordecai Tremaine, Poirot, snow, whodunits

If you are so well-organised that you buy presents now for next Christmas, and there’s an aficionado of whodunits in your family, then how about Murder for Christmas, by Francis Duncan?

My daughter bought this for me this year and I’m very glad she did.   A snowbound country mansion; a mixed assortment of guests (with dark secrets) invited to spend Christmas in traditional manner by the genial owner of the house; mysterious footprints in the snow; a malevolent stranger standing outside the gate; and yes, the house has a secret passage! Then, Father Christmas is found murdered at the foot of the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. What could be better?

Written in 1949, it features the amateur sleuth Mordecai Tremaine, a retired tobacconist who likes romance novels. (Why not? Why should a love of opera or of playing the violin be superior?)  Just like Poirot in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, he has been invited to join the Christmas house party (by the host’s secretary) because it is feared that something nasty is afoot. The guests include star-crossed lovers, a self-important politician, an irascible alcoholic, an angry scientist who dislikes Christmas, two femmes fatales, an alarmed niece, and an apparently nondescript married couple.

The clues are there, and theoretically the reader could work out the solution before Mordecai explains it. That clever reader would have to exert some powers of imagination, but I think it could be done. I didn’t manage it.

Francis Duncan wrote over 20 crime novels between 1937 and 1959.  This is the first one I’ve read.

It’s published in the Vintage Murder Mysteries series. ISBN 978-1-784-70345-5 RRP £8-99

‘The Monogram Murders’

Tags

Agatha Christie, pastiche, Poirot, Sophie Hannah

Followers of Hercule Poirot have had a long wait. Curtain appeared from the pen of the Queen of Crime back in 1975. Since then we’ve had to wait for new actors to play him – Peter Ustinov or Ian Holm, for example – or for the amazing David Suchet to work his way through the oeuvre.

Now (or since last year, when it was published by HarperCollins) we have a new novel, The Monogram Murders. This is a most entertaining pastiche by Sophie Hannah. The dustjacket carries an approving statement from its chairman, Agatha Christie’s grandson Mathew Prichard, chairman of Agatha Christie Ltd.

For me it was a great read. An intriguing plot, with a splendidly complex solution. There are echoes of At Bertram’s Hotel meets St Mary Mead. (I know those are both Miss Marple, but it’s the venues that do the echoing …)

The narrator is Edward Catchpool, a 32-year-old Scotland Yard detective who is temporarily sharing lodgings with Poirot. He appears to be in awe of the great man and lets him have more or less complete control of the investigation. Poirot seems to have decided to train him.

The story starts in Pleasant’s Coffee House, a café somewhere away from central London which Poirot frequents because it serves uniquely good coffee. He is much taken with a young customer called Jennie who seems in fear of her life and who utters cryptic sentences, such as “It’s too late. I am already dead, you see, or I shall be soon”, and “Let no-one open their mouths!”

The scene shifts to the Bloxham Hotel, one of London’s finest. At the same time as Poirot is meeting Jennie three bodies are found: all poisoned, all laid out neatly, and all with cufflinks in their mouths bearing the monogram PJI. They are in rooms 121, 238 and 317. They are Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus, and they have all been seen alive at 7-15 pm when they were served tea together in room 238. A mysterious note is then left at reception, saying ‘May they never rest in peace. 121. 238. 317.’ This prompts the discovery of their bodies at 8-15 pm.

We also visit Great Holling, a village very much à la Christie, where you can almost smell the malice and the distrust. Catchpool goes there but the only person who will talk to him at all reasonably is Margaret Ernst, the widow of a former vicar, who is friendly with the doctor, Dr Ambrose Flowerday. We learn of a tragedy of years past.

To say more would give too much away. Suffice it to say that the traditional scene at the end where Poirot explains all, in the Bloxham Hotel’s dining room, has its surprises.

If I have one criticism it is that in the first half of the novel Poirot himself seems somehow static, and he did not come over to me as having quite the colour of the original. But that detracted little from my enjoyment of this meticulously plotted whodunit.

Well done Sophie Hannah.