Off to Italy this time with The Disappearance of Signora Giulia, by Piero Chiara

9781782271048
Pushkin Vertigo, 2015
originally published as I giovedi della signora giulia, 1970
translated by Jill Foulston
122 pp

paperback

Set in 1955, The Disappearance of Signora Giulia is one of the most truly baffling mysteries I've read in quite some time.  By the time I finished this book, I was totally perplexed.  And trust me -- after having read thousands of mystery novels in my time,  "baffling" is not a term I throw about willy nilly, but I'm certainly not going to spill my guts as to why I found it so.  

 Commissario Corrado Sciancalepre returns from a conference with the Chief Constable in the "small town of M_____" in Northern Lombardy and gets a big surprise.  Waiting in his office is Esengrini, the area's "most agile and authoritative criminal lawyer" who is there with an "incredibly serious matter," which, as he puts it, will likely turn his entire life "upside down."  It seems that his wife, the titular "Signora Giulia," has left home, and Esengrini needs Sciancalepre's help in trying to find her.  La Signora was supposed to have caught a train that day for Milan, which she does every Thursday, to see their daughter Emilia at her boarding school, to make the rounds of various places in the city, and to do things for her friends while she's there, catching the two p.m. train and coming home by 7:30 in the evening.  On this particular Thursday though,  it seems that Signora Giulia never caught the train.  When Sciancalepre returns with Esengrini to his home, he discovers that perhaps she'd been planning to stay longer than her usual few hours this time -- her bedroom is "a complete mess," a lot of clothing has gone with her and so has her jewelry.  Her husband had also heard her "moving around continually, opening drawers, shifting chairs" the night before, and according to him, she was "agitated."  But wait. It's here that the first of a number of secrets pervading this novel comes tumbling out, as Esengrini confesses to the Commissario that he'd known for some time she'd been seeing other men on those Thursdays, using the visits to her daughter as a cover.  He'd even had her followed four months earlier because Giulia, 38, had started turning cold toward her 60 year-old spouse in the last year, and Esengrini had wanted to know why.  Sciancalepre offers to try to find her, but this is 1955, and he needs Esengrini to bring a charge against her so he can do so.  Esengrini decides it's going to be a case of "abandoning the marital home," which is enough for our Commissario to begin his search.  But this is definitely NOT going to be an easy or simple case of finding a runaway wife, and Sciancalepre doesn't realize at the time that this case is will be years in the solving, and even then ....

Despite some minor lulls here and there in the telling, The Disappearance of Signora Giulia is beyond compelling and it's certainly one of the most unconventional crime stories I've ever read. It is a true whodunit in every sense of the term, with a big, no make that huge,  twist I never saw coming.  When I finished it, the first words coming out of my mouth were "that's just brilliant," and if anyone reading this post decides to read it, you'll see why.  I pondered over that ending for some time and when a book makes me do that, well, I call it a good one.

Very much recommended, especially for readers of older crime novels, for readers of international crime, and for readers of crime fiction who enjoy something completely different.

revisiting Miss Marple: Nemesis, by Agatha Christie

The cover photo above is probably my favorite for this book; mine is part of a set of  Bantam black leatherette hardcover editions and has a cover that is really dull.  However, it's all about what's inside, and there is nothing at all dull about Christie's Nemesis, where Miss Marple's cover as dotty old lady comes in more than handy.  I say her "cover," because as she discovers in this book, she has a propensity to be "ruthless" when she needs to and as it will turn out, she'll definitely need to call on that trait before all is said and done.  Personally, I think this is one of the best Marples in the bunch.

Originally published in 1951, Nemesis opens with our dear Miss Marple scanning the obituaries in the local newspaper, and running across a name she knows --  Mr. Jason Rafiel, whom she'd met while on holiday in the Caribbean, has passed away.  A week later, she receives a letter summoning her to London, where she is received by Rafiel's solicitors.  It seems that Mr. Rafiel has left her a bequest of twenty thousand pounds, but there's a catch:  Miss Marple must, within a year,  "investigate a certain crime," to "serve the cause of justice."  What that crime is though, is left unspecified, and the only clue she has comes in yet another letter inviting her to be part of Tour No. 37 of the Famous Houses and Gardens of Great Britain, a tour that will last two to three weeks.  She knows she must go, and taking stock once on the tour, notes that

"...What is involved in my problem is justice. Either to set right an injustice or to avenge evil by bringing it to justice." 

She understands that this must absolutely be the case because it is "in accord with the code word Nemesis given to me by Mr. Rafiel."   What she doesn't realize, however, is how very strange this case will turn out to be.

Some time ago somebody in an online group I belong to said something along the lines of Christie being  for old ladies (I do believe the phrase "blue hairs" was used), and it sort of got my dander up. My brown-haired self was actually offended that someone who'd probably never even read her work was saying this.  This book disproves his statement -- not only is Nemesis an engaging mystery, but here we see a different side of our old-lady sleuth, who has zero tolerance, no matter what the circumstances, for evil, and a Jane Marple who will face down a deadly foe to serve the cause of justice. There's more, of course -- for example, a look at an England changed after the war -- but really this one is all about Jane Marple herself.

If you haven't read it yet, do yourself a huge favor and pick up a copy.  You can skip the TV adaptation with Geraldine McEwan -- not even close to the novel and very disappointing. I knew I was in trouble when I saw a Nazi soldier parachuting out of the sky, and then, of course, there were the nuns -- seriously WTF?   I'm still digging through garage boxes to find my Nemesis dvd with Joan Hickson as Marple but I can't imagine it would be anywhere near as awful as the McEwan version -- I finished it last night wondering if the screenwriters had even read the book.  But here, it's the book that counts, and Christie has outdone herself with this one.

and speaking of Madeleine Smith, here's the story from Christianna Brand as Mary Ann Ashe: Alas for Her that Met Me!

0352397098
Wyndham, 1976
191 pp

paperback

I have this thing for Victorian murderers and murderesses -- I don't understand why this topic is so fascinating to me, but well, it just is. As with Marie Belloc Lowndes'  Letty Lynton, Alas for her that met me! is a disguised version of the Madeleine Smith story, a case so well documented in (just to name a couple of nonfiction works) Mary S. Hartman's Victorian Murderesses and Roughead's  "To Meet Miss Madeleine Smith" in his Classic Crimes (published by NYRB). [As a sidebar, I just bought Jack House's Square Mile of Murder which also takes on Smith's case. ]  You may not recognize the name Mary Ann Ashe, but you will recognize the name of  Christianna Brand, who according to SYKM, has seventeen crime/mystery novels to her credit as well as four short-story collections.  She's also the author of the Nurse Mathilda stories, which were the basis of the 2005 movie "Nanny McPhee."

Unlike Marie Belloc Lowndes who modernized the story and moved it to England,  Ashe (as I'll refer to her in this post), chose to keep her story in Victorian-era Glascow, but she adds a strange twist to the case I didn't see coming. I won't give details just in case any vintage-crime reader is interested in this book, but the novel is set up very nicely so that  it's only near the end of the story when it hits you exactly what's actually happened here, which turns out to be a big surprise.   Getting to that point may seem a little slow and, also like Letty Lynton, Ashe's story seems to hang in the chick-lit realm for quite a while until darkness falls.  While I totally dislike romance-ish crime fiction, the folly of  l'amour does serve a purpose here and to her credit, Ashe doesn't let it ruin or take over the story.   Making just one further comparison to Lowndes' book, while both authors examine class distinction in their work, Ashe takes things a wee bit further by 1) looking at things for a while from a servant's point of view that shows that life in service wasn't always as it was in Upstairs Downstairs and 2)  examining the gradations in the system that existed in upper-class Victorian society, where, for example as in the case of the father of the main character, being x number of years away from a family fortune based on trade was actually a stigma to be lived down.

It's a fun little book that satisfied my appetite for historical crime fiction, and I most definitely appreciated the surprising twist in the story.   I'm afraid it may be a little tame for modern readers who look for a lot of action or kickass heroines in their crime, but vintage crime lovers should definitely enjoy it, especially those familiar with the Madeleine Smith case of 1857.

 And that reminds me -- while I'm a work widow this coming week, I'll be watching David Lean's 1950 black-and-white movie about this Victorian case entitled Madeleine. One of my online friends directed me to the film and now I can't wait to see it.  Getting back to the book, While I preferred Letty Lynton's ending in Lowndes' version of events, the storyline in Ashe's book was definitely better.  Oh, what the hell  -- true vintage/historical crime readers should read both of them!

obscure darkness brought to light: A Dark Corner, by Celia Dale

9780571246557
Faber and Faber (Faber Finds), 2008
originally published 1971
155 pp

paperback

The best way to describe this book: stomach churning.  A Dark Corner is #4 in my ongoing project of finding and reading obscure women writers, and it is easily available in paperback from Faber, it has been reproduced as as part of the publisher's excellent Faber Finds series.  And so far, it's been the darkest and most edgy novel of the four.  Actually, I had no idea at that I was going to be so completely devastated by this novel when I first picked it up. Oh my god -- to say that this book is dark is an understatement.  I like dark as a rule, but I'd just read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Stephen Gregory's The Cormorant, both of which are beyond disturbing, so it's been darkness on darkness on darkness, which even for me is too much all at once.

Arthur and Nelly Didcot  live in a small but respectable house on London's Wardlow Road.  On a dark rainy evening,  Nelly is summoned to the door where she discovers a young man named Errol with a terrible cough. He's got an ad for a room in his hand, but he has mistakenly come to the wrong street, looking for Wardlow Crescent.  Nelly, though, takes pity on him and brings him in for a cup of tea and a warm up by the fire. Errol has a fever and Nelly just can't bring herself to send him on his way.  When Arthur comes home and Nelly tells them they have a house guest, Arthur's not too happy, but allows Errol to stay. Soon the temporary arrangement becomes more permanent, and Nelly's happy -- she's a shut in, she'd lost her son when he was a teen, and her affection for Errol begins to grow. Arthur also seems to get used to the arrangement, taking Errol around with him on his Sunday walks and showing him the "project" he's been working on for years in the privacy of his den that no one, not even Nelly has ever seen.  Errol returns Nelly's affection, but how he feels toward Arthur eventually becomes an entirely different story.  The dynamic between the two literally pushes Errol into the titular "dark corner" from which there may be no possible escape.

The darkness in this book, believe it or not, has nothing to do with the number of dead bodies that are literally piling up, but with what actually goes on behind closed doors in that house on Wardlow Road. A Dark Corner is a story that reveals the secrets that hide behind the facade of respectability; it also asks the question of  how a seemingly normal person who prides himself on his high moral and ethical standards can turn out to be a monster who is free to roam the city streets.  As a warning to potential readers,  this book contains a lot of racist content, but it is not done maliciously, instead reflecting a psychotic sickness lodged in the mind of a truly evil and demented person.

What happens in this novel literally made me squirm on several levels and actually left me unable to sleep after finishing it. However, the worst part of the entire novel is the message that literally  anyone might turn out to be the human monster of this book and we may not even have a clue.

definitely NOT for the faint hearted.