Category: Krimi

Ben Pastor, The Venus of Salo (2006). 

Good Reads meta-data is 416 pages, rated 4.0 by 2 litizens.  

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Italian.

Tagline: The end of days. 

Verdict:  A head spinner.

This is Wehrmacht Colonel Martin von Bora’s eighth outing and his steps are weary and sometimes dreary as he tries hold onto this integrity in the cauldron of madness.  He is assigned to the fantasy world of the Italian Social Republic (of Salò) in October 1944. For those who cut that class, this republic was the rump of northern Italy where in late September 1943 Hitler installed the recently rescued Ben Mussolini as dictator for an encore. It is a bizarre world, seemingly run by Italians with Germans monitoring everything. Yes, it is a puppet state, if it is a state in anything but name. And it dissolved in late April 1945. 

Its ministries and offices were housed in the many luxury hotels, palaces, and grand houses in Brescia along the lakes, some in Salò but also scattered further along the Lemon Coast, as it was once called. Lake Garda was the most well-known feature. 

This limbo world is ending with the Allied armies progressing up the spine of Italy day-by-day, the residents of this never-never-land go about their business as usual.  The industrialist does industry. The art restorer restores art. The police officer hands out traffic tickets. The gardener gardens.  All seeming in ignorance, or defiance, of the fact that the end of their world is nigh and that a night of retribution will follow.  

Into this twilight world come the diplomatic representatives of Germany, Japan, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Thailand along with the client states of Croatia, Slovakia, and even Manchukuo.  Embassy receptions are the social high point.  Although by late 1944 when Bora arrived, the representatives of Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary were marooned with no homeland to which to return. 

Well, not quite in ignorance since partisan raids, bombings, assassinations are weekly, and the flow of retreating and battered Germans northward is obvious, even as the rhetoric of final victory is turned up to deafening. Despite Mussolini’s personal appeals to Hitler, the fate of Italian soldiers, especially in the eastern Mediterranean, disarmed and interned by the Germans was often terminal. But the residents of Salò seem blind to these signals of the coming apocalypse.   

On the surface the lakeside town where Bora is assigned is calm and attractive.  Many days the war is far away, even if U.S. bombers overfly it en route to or from Turin or Milan.  A valuable painting has been stolen from the local German army headquarters and Bora is to find it, and the culprit(s). In the chaos of murder, Jewish round ups, reprisals, and violence he is to find a painting. Then a series of murders cuts across his investigation, and he is off on the scent.  

***

It is very well done, though I do find Bora’s hangdog depression repetitive.  His problems seem small in the context, and I finished the book wondering about the fate of those he left behind when he was evacuated.  The plot is a braid of many strands and left me with a spinning head as above.  

By the way the author is…..Maria Verbena Volpi (1950+) who has two other series.  Whew!    

N.B.  This telling has nothing in common with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s nauseating film ‘Salò’ (1975) with its graphic and explicit violence of branding, hanging, and scalping; torture of the tongue, genitals, and eye balls; rape of both men and women, and murder in the same milieu.  Enough. 

Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart (1972) by H. R. F. Keating 

GoodReads meta-data is 201 pages, rated 3.65 by 100 litizns. 

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Indian; sub-species: Anglo-Indian.

Tagline:  High and Low. 

Verdict: Diverting.  

The ever reliable, though painfully diffident, Inspector Ganesh Ghote does it again with slow and steady perseverance.

A very rich man’s son is kidnapped and a gigantic ransom is demanded.  But wait!  It is not the rich man’s son but his playmate in a case of mistaken identity.  Nonetheless, the kidnappers press their demands. 

The rich man would certainly have paid anything for his own son, but for the son of an underling who happened to be playing with his boy, well, that is different, or is it?  That is the question. 

As usual, Ghote’s approach is compromised and hampered by a bumptious superior.  Nor is Ghote aided by the imperious, if confused, father who thinks he knows better than anyone else, including this nondescript police officer.  

While the others turn this way and that, Ghote sees what is in plain sight, and follows up on it to discover the plot is nearly home-grown, but…..

***

The portrayal of Indian urban life is rich and provides a crucial context for the story.  As well done as it is, I could not help but think of the Akira Kurosawa film High and Low (1963) on the same theme played out with Shakespearean intensity and irony.  

Rivers of London (2011) by Ben Aaronovitch

Good Reads meta-data is 392 pages, rated 3.86 by 130,264 litizens.  

Genre: Fiction: Species: krimi. Sub-species: Fantasy

DNA: Brit.

Verdict: Harry Potter with a body count.

Tagline: Mind the undertow. 

Constable guards the perimeter police tape of a crime scene one dreary January night in the cold and mist when an eye witness to that earlier crime appears to him. Training kicked in, Constable opens his notebook to take a statement from this apparition whose address is a graveyard, and he is a ghost as he proves to Constable’s satisfaction and consternation.  

By the time Constable’s partner reappears with coffee, ghost has departed (again).  Copper dares not tell anyone but, how can he not, so he blurts out this confrontation to his partner, who promises not to tell. As if.

Soon this undistinguished constable is selected for a special squad since it seems he has a gift of sight…into the world of ghosts, goblins, demons, spirits, magic, and such. The Met needs all the help it can get and he becomes, duly sworn in, a sorcerer’s apprentice.  

Meanwhile, the bodies keep falling and the plot thickens to curdled cream.  The ride is a mile-a-minute, the prose is crisp, the wit is diabolical.  There is a melody of irony and humour in it all. There is also infanticide. 

This world of magic may be crazy, but is reality any less crazy?  There is no easy answer to that when watching the television news.  Plenty of child-murder there, too. 

It all ends where it began, sort of, though the dog reappears, its agent failed to get it the major part it should have had. Toby you can do better! 

It is part of a series.

Of course, what it brings to mind is Wellington Paranormal, which is low key by comparison.  Oh, and Punch and Judy.

Treachery (2014) by S. J. Parris

GoodReads meta-data is 540 pages rated 4.21 by 3,566 litizens.

Genre: Krimi; Species: Period.

DNA: Old Blighty.

Verdict: Ugh!

Tagline: Wheels within wheels.

The perennial exile Giordano Bruno is on the case again, accompanying Sir Phillip Sidney to Plymouth in the year of 1585.  

There they meet Sir Francis Drake, and a great many other old and new salts.  A death occurs on Drake’s ship while at anchor in port.  Was it suicide or murder?  He wants to find out before setting out to kill more Spaniards.

Sidney pushes Bruno into investigating as a favour to Drake.  

As if murder is not enough to motivate Bruno, there is also a missing book of the New Testament, an old nemesis, and assorted other villains.

I needed a scorecard to keep track of the red herrings, and just about everyone is a crook of one kind or another, including our hero.  As usual the forlorn Bruno is dead sexy to a beautiful woman in the usual way.  Murder and mayhem ensues.  

There is a perplexing cast of character submerged into elaborately described detail of the time and place: sights and smells, hygiene (lack of) and disease (much of), and so on, and on, and on, and on. And on. It seems the author strove for 600-pages but succumbed to exhaustion. I know I did.The detail is piled high mistaking altitude for entertainment.

S. J. Parris, Alchemy (2023) 

GoodReads Meta-data is 473 pages rated 4.47 by 337 litizens

Genre: Krimi: Species: Period.

Verdict: intense

Tagline: Fear the book!  

It is the winter of 1588 along the River Vltava in Prague as Dr Giordano Bruno arrived, ingenue assistant in tow, sent by Francis Walsingham, English Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, to make contact with his agent-in-place John Dee.  No sooner did Bruno cross the stone bridge than he was set upon that very dark and dreary night by two Spanish thugs. No Pilsner for him.

Prague was then a polyglot crossroads where the Holy Roman Emperor, having vacated Vienna for a quieter life in rustic Prague, shut himself up in the castle on the hill. This hermit is Rudolph II (1552-1612) whose interests are so otherworldly that he allowed religious freedom within the city.  The result was that Catholics hate him for tolerating Protestants who in turn hated him for tolerating Catholics, and the two only combine to hate Jews, who know a good thing cannot last.  

Rudolph, barely five feet tall in pumps, is fragile but determined. Most of that determination is devoted to his scientific and meta-scientific interest in this, that, and everything from automatons to Harry Potter’s philosopher’s stone. His patronage has attracted to Prague scientist, alchemists, astronomers, occultists, mediums, seers, and charlatans who speak a babel of tongues.  

The Papal nuncio plots his downfall with the ready assistance of the Spanish ambassador, while Protestants undermine Rudolph’s tolerant Catholic chief minister. In between the Jewish community knows that whoever prevails will come after it next and so makes campaign contributions to both parties.    

There are so many wheels within wheels that it takes quick-witted Bruno an interminably long time to sort them out.  The open-faced and friendly librarian is stealing books from the Imperial Library. The honest and steadfast book dealer is corrupt.  The dying old man is a knife murderer from his own deathbed. His pregnant daughter carts away the bodies for later mutilation.  The respect-inspiring patriarch is double-dealing. The girlish countess is a poisoner. The Spanish thugs are, well, thugs. A Spanish Inquisitor on holiday in Prague admits he misses breaking people’s fingers in the name of god. Whew!  What a cast.  What’s worse than all that however is Rudolph’s secret grand plan …[which will remain secret].

Some of this mischief stretches credibility but so be it. The plotting is – see above – complicated but all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fall into place by the end. That in itself is a wonder.  

By the way, Rudolph paralleled Queen Elizabeth of England in remaining unmarried. He realised that unwed, he was a prize for matrimony. He encouraged many such prospects to keep royals, nobles, aristocrats, and other chancers catering to him and seeking his favour in the hope or marrying a daughter to him. No fool he.  

This is the seventh in a continuing series of Bruno’s adventures before the Florida Inquisition got him.  Years ago I read the first, Heresy (2010) which was set in Oxford at New College (where I once bunked for a conference) a long time ago. I found that the plumbing hadn’t changed since Bruno’s visit.) It was well done but the atmosphere, as in this one, was suffocating and I did not follow Bruno’s trail. In a way that means it was too well done for my feeble tastes.  

We visited Prague not so long ago and we traipsed through Prague Castle, from whence all of his treasures had long since been looted or destroyed by one conquering army or another. The weather was benign during our visit and after I completed my duties at Charles University we wandered about and crossed that very same bridge a number of times.  Then I read Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Princes and Artists (1976) which included but did not concentrate on Rudy, leaving me with the desire to learn more about him. Hence I started this book.

Congo Venus (1950)

Good Reads meta-data is 220 pages rated 3.79 by 19 literatizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Slowly dried the paint.

Tagline: Yakkity yak.

Dateline: Léopoldville, Belgian Congo, 1947.

Gofer has returned to the Belgian Congo with another aide project, this one run by the United Nations. To meet the needs of the plot, the implacable, the unflappable Dr Finney arrives, and Gofer spends page after page telling her what has been happening in the metropolis of Léopoldville with its European population of a couple of thousands and native population many times that but never counted.

After some tooth-grinding banter, Gofer gets to the big news. The reigning beauty queen of the Europeans died of malaria.  Long zig-zag account of her beauty and more on what a nice and innocent woman she was. Once dead, rumours began, as they often do, with a denial, i.e., ‘it can’t be true that…’ and ‘I refuse to believe that…’. The hot air roots spread the gossip.  That is a clever technique on both levels, reality and fiction.

One rumour is that the doctor who treated Beauty was incompetent and caused her death by prescribing Coca Cola to treat her malaria when it should have been Pepsi Cola. In fact that doctor wrote to the peripatetic Finney to ask her to come to the big city to do a post hoc medical audit of this treatment to save his reputation. No autopsy was done, because in equatorial Africa the cremation was on the day of her death.  All Finney has are Doctor’s notes and his records of the drugs dispensed. We get to know and like the alcoholic stereotype Doctor who paints. 

Seeing nothing that would precipitate death in a healthy and vigorous young woman, Finney sets out to investigate by talking everyone to tedium. We meet the cipher husband and – insert drumroll here! – his sister-in-law from his first wife who died in a crash years ago. Sis-in-law has been living chastely with Cipher since to raise a niece and housekeep for him, but hopes for further developments. Sis has the vanity of scholar who published a book…large. She presents herself as a grande dame in this wilderness. She is a interesting character at first but soon becomes another cardboard cutout.

Finney figures it all out. Sis descends into madness.  The end.

The author’s biography says he did work in Africa. So be it but the locale in these pages is nothing more than a painted backdrop encyclopaedia-article deep. The natives are servants. There is no hint of the egregious and merciless cruelty Belgian colonialism visited upon the region. Nor of its wilful determination to hang onto this colony, from which all that gold in Brussels had been extracted in human flesh, during the opening act of decolonisation in the immediate post war period, leading to a petulant, overnight withdrawal in 1960. It seemed fitting that the Belgians left like thieves in the night only later to return to the scene of their crimes.

There are a couple more Finney books because she got around to Portuguese Africa, too, in that encyclopaedia. Language is no barrier for her. She has yet to run into the United Nations’ man in Africa, the remarkable Ralph Bunch, Cal basketball player and tireless diplomat, a man President Kennedy wanted in the State Department but who declined, preferring to stay at the U.N.  Imagine Strom Thurmond  giving advice and consent to that nomination.  Don’t know Strom? Keep it that way. Bunche you should know.