Italian Crime Fiction

Bologna, northern Italy, November 1944. The introduction to this excellent novel explains the political situation in more detail but, in a nutshell, Italy is divided. The provisional ‘free’ government has surrendered to the Allies who are, painfully, fighting their way north up the spine of the country. Most of Italy – including Bologna – is still under German control. The city, with its ancient churches, porticos and squares, now resembles a giant farmyard. Rural villages around the city have now moved in, bringing livestock and farm carts full of straw and root vegetables.

Bolognese copper Comandante De Luca has three murders to investigate. The three dead men giving De Luca a headache are: Francesco Tagliaferri, in life an engineer, in death just a corpse with a shattered head, slumped against the column of a portico in Via Senzanome; Professor Franco Maria Brullo, of the city’s Faculty of Medicine, shot dead through the eye; most problematic, given the Germans’ penchant for violent retribution, is the corrupted body of a minor SS functionary, Rottenführer Weber, found floating in a flooded cellar. The latter is key, as if De Luca doesn’t solve the killing of the SS corporal the Nazi authorities will execute ten random Italian prisoners pour encourager les autres {or its equivalent in Italian.

As Caliban said, “The isle is full of noises,” and among the ‘noises’ to disrupt the lives of Bologna’s citizens are The Black Brigades (ultra violent fascist volunteers), the Bodogliani (left wing partisans loyal to the the King) and activists with all manners of allegiances in between. Rather like Philip Kerr’s immortal Bernie Gunther, De Luca tries to be a decent copper with his left hand tied behind his back and the fingers of his right holding his nose against the stench of corruption.

Parts of Bologna resemble a nightmare visualised in a Bosch painting. A young man in a derelict theatre – where shattered families are trying to rebuild their lives in the boxes once patronised by wealthy theatre-goers, faces Deluca. When challenged for his identity, he says,

“What do you want to see? My military rank? My exemption from labor?” He beat his hand on his shoulder and grimaced because he must have hurt himself. “Here are my documents. This,” he shook the empty sleeve, “I left in Russia. And what I am wearing,” he held the flap of his coat, “is all I have left.”

The Bologna winter is certainly dark, but Lucarelli’s prose renders the shattered city with the inky blackness of a genuine Noir novel.

“There was in the air the scent of old smoke, ashes and wet filth which Bologna always had during that year and a half of war. Damp and sticky in summer, dry and biting in winter. The stench of boiled cabbage and burnt oil, of urine and excrement, sweat and dust, cold and coarse like rusted iron.”

While reading this, my mind strayed to Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. Not only was Bologna the target for Yossarian’s squadron but, towards the end of the book, a cold wind blows away the buffoonery, and we are left with the blacked out streets, and the grim murder of the maid Michaela, by the psychopathic navigator, ‘Aarfy’ Aardvark.

Lucarelli gives us a labyrinthine plot and a reassuringly fallible central character, who makes many mistakes and wrong calls as he searches for the truth. Reassuringly, there is also a full glossary explaining the multitude of different factions and splinter groups which made up the Italian political landscape in 1944. Bizarre though it sounds given their brutality, the Wehrmacht and the SS give a sense of relative unity to what was, otherwise, chaos.

This novel follows on from three earlier books, known as the De Luca trilogy, consistg of Carte Blanche (it: Carta bianca, 1990), The Damned Season (it: L’estate torbida, 1991), and Goose Street (it: Via Delle Oche, 1996). The Darkest Winter, translated by Joseph Farrell, is published by Open Borders Press/Orenda Books, and will be available on 22nd May. For an Englishman’s view of a very different Italy, a few months earlier than Lucarelli’s story, you should read There’s No Home by Alexander Baron, where we join a British unit in the south of the peninsula, not long after the Germans had retreated to their defence lines further north.

“I pledge my allegiance to the Italian Republic,
to faithfully observe and execute its Constitution
and the laws of the state, and to comply with the duties
of my office in the interestof the administration for the public good.”

Well said, Signorina! Well sworn! Thus spake Colomba Caselli when she joined the Italian police force. Now she is Deputy Chief Caselli of the Third Section of Rome’s Homicide Squad, but this outrageously entertaining novel details a thousand and one different ways in which Caselli – “thirty-three years old in her body but a few years older in the green eyes that changed hue with her mood.” – breaks her vow to be an obedient police officer.

Side by side with a pharmaceutically-addicted genius called Dante Torre she attempts to solve a grotesque mass murder. The express train from Milan to Rome arrives safely. Safe, that is, except for the passengers in the first class compartments who have all died in grotesque agony. Their bodies are discovered by an officer of the Railway Police and when he alerts his superiors,“la merda colpisce il ventilatore..” as they might (but probably don’t) say in Rome. Ironically, it is the fan from the air conditioning unit which has spread the deadly gas.

Despite the usual suspects – none other than the “Allahu Akhbar”- chanting killers from ISIS – claiming responsibility for the atrocity, Caselli smells a particularly putrid rat, and she breaks away from official shackles to track down the real killer. Dazieri does a fair job of explaining relationship between Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre, but the full picture relies quite heavily on the back story which played out in the earlier novel, Kill The Father. It seems that Torre had been held captive by a malevolent psychopath – The Father – but, with the help of Caselli has escaped, but not before both he and the policewoman have sustained significant physical and mental damage.

As readers, we learn that the real killer sought by Caselli and Torre is an almost supernaturally gifted killer, a woman known as Giltine, the Lithuanian Angel of Death. The action spins back and forth between Rome, Venice and Berlin and, just as peeling an onion reveals further layers, a complex collision of events is revealed. At the root of the malevolent and seemingly indestructible Giltin’s thirst for violent revenge is something which happened in a remote region of Ukraine on 25th April 1986. Watch out, though, for a very, very clever twist regarding the avenging angel. A clue, but no plot spoiler, I hope – have any of you ever read Harry Bingham’s amazing Fiona Griffiths novels?

Kill The Angel, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar (right), is ridiculously entertaining. The narrative constantly breaks the speed limit, and Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre are wonderfully imagined character. We can boo and hiss as Colomba is screwed – in all senses of the word – by sinister global forces, but she is a truly modern kick-arse (‘ass’ for US readers) heroine and she scorches her way across the pages of this gripping novel.

Be warned: even readers who might think themselves strong of stomach and with a healthy capacity to absorb horrors might find themselves reaching for Aunt Maud’s smelling salts. Visions from Hell loom large, like the child forced to sit with a deadly arachnid sealed in his mouth, or the hideously scarred man who, having survived a catastrophic fire in a night club, recovers – only to be eviscerated with a shard of mirror glass wielded by an enraged sociopath. ‘Kill The Angel, by Sandrone Dazieri (below) is published by Simon and Schuster, and is out now.