The second novel in the Bar Lume series, by Marco Malvaldi, Three-Card Monte brings us once more into the life of Pineta, a small town in Tuscany, near Pisa, with the Bar Lume and its often hilarious characters as its focal point. Owned by thirty-seven-year-old Massimo Viviani, a single man trying to put his life back together after a devastating breakup, the Bar Lume and his responsibilities there have become almost a refuge for him – or as much of a refuge as any place can be when it is occupied every day by four cranky and gossipy oldtimers who regard “their table” at the Bar Lume as their “office.” Ranging in age from seventy-three to eighty-two, they have known each other all their lives –and they keep up a running commentary on everything that is happening in town and everyone who is involved in it. Drop one word in front of this elderly quartet from the Bar Lume, and it will make its way instantly all over town without any of the men ever having to leave the “office.” As the novel opens, Koichi Kawaguchi, a computer expert, has just arrived at the airport on his way to the Twelfth International Workshop in Macromolecular and Biomacromolecular Chemistry in Pineta, near Pisa, one of about two hundred theoretical and experimental scientists who are attending. Before long, the Japanese main speaker is dead and Kawaguchi is acting as a translator in the investigation.
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Moments of tenderness alternate with dramatic moments of violence in this semi-autobiographical novel of World War II by Tatamkhulu Afrika, a name assumed by the author late in life and meaning “Grandfather Africa.” As the novel begins, an elderly man is opening two letters which accompany a package. Telling the story from his own point of view, the old man learns in the first letter, from a law firm, that someone the speaker refers to only as “he,” someone he knew more than fifty years ago, has died after a long illness and that the speaker has received a legacy. The second letter is from “him,” a man who has been “lost” to the speaker for virtually all of his post-war life. The legacy and the letter clearly upset the speaker as he wonders “Am I permitting a phantom a power that belongs to me alone? What relevance do they still have – a war that time has tamed into the damp squib of every other war, [and] a love whose strangeness is best left buried where it lies?” Though he knows he should leave the past buried, he is unable to resist. What follows is the story of the four years the speaker survived when, during the long siege of Tobruk, he suddenly found himself a prisoner of war. This is an honest and controlled novel which focuses brilliantly on some of the well-known but less publicized aspects of prison camp life.
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Valuing the idea that “keeping it simple” is important to the success of mystery stories, author Marco Malvaldi draws deliberate parallels between the conclusion in Leonardo Sciascia’s, A Simple Story, in which the main character suddenly finds “where the light switch is,” the clue that allows him to solve the entire mystery, and the final resolution in Malvaldi’s own Game for Five, as bartender Massimo Viviani suddenly solves the murder of a young woman. Simple deductions have been the key to his success. This short, uncomplicated, and often very funny novel depends for its success on more than the mystery itself, however. Quirky characters, three of them in their mid-seventies and one in his eighties, gather regularly at Massimo’s Bar Lume to pass the time playing heated games of briscola and gossiping about everyone and everything in a coastal community outside of Pisa. Massimo, the thirty-ish bartender/owner at the Bar Lume, humors these characters, often joining in their card game as a fifth player when times are slow, and chatting and sharing their lives with them, valuing their commentary on all subjects and offering his own, sometimes contrary observations to keep things lively. The solution to the mystery, which is delayed till the very end, is almost unimportant to the fun of the book. It is Massimo’s point of view which carries the novel – his comments about life in the town, about its people, and about Italy, reflect his good nature and his never-failing sense of humor, making this novel closer to comedy than to noir.
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When the body of a thin, little orphan, guarded by a small dog, is discovered in an alcove at the base of the Tondo di Capodimonte staircase in Naples, Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi di Malomonte is on the case. It is 1930, and Naples is preparing for the imminent arrival of Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, Italy’s ruler. In this case, Ricciardi is perplexed because that no ghostly image (a perception which has always helped him to solve crimes of violence) appears when he examines the boy’s body, suggesting that the child was murdered elsewhere and transported to the place where he was found. In many ways, this novel is quite different from the first three novels. Far darker and more sinister than his previous novels, it is almost totally lacking in the dry humor which frequently appears in the other novels and which provides, even with the novels’ dark and sometimes gruesome murders, a kind of playfulness, almost a “literary wink,” to keep the reader of those novels intrigued (and sometimes amused), rather than repelled by the sometimes gruesome crimes. Here, from the outset, however, the author creates the darkest of moods, using the pathos of the death of a tiny orphan boy, protected by his only friend, a small dog, to create a constant play on the reader’s heartstrings.
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Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi must deal with his personal ghosts and memories at the same time that he is also working to solve murders as head of the Department of Public Safety in Naples during the reign of Benito Mussolini in 1931. Ricciardi, a compulsively private man who shares nothing about his life with those he works with, lives in his family’s home in Naples with his Tata Rosa, who has taken care of him all his life. The orphan of aristocratic parents, Ricciardi has no siblings and no life outside of his office. Neapolitan author Maurizio de Giovanni, exceptionally sensitive to all his characters and their stories, so clearly identifies with his “people” that he never hits a false note as he develops the action and shows their reactions to what life has in store. Horrific murders take place, and his characters show their weaknesses and personal traumas, but this novel, like the others in the series, is more of a “people novel” than what one thinks of as “noir” or “hard case crime.” De Giovanni is clearly enjoying himself – having fun – as he writes, and while there is little obvious humor here, there are moments that are almost farcical, especially with some of the subplots involving love. Throughout, the author’s smile is easy to hear in his “voice” as he tells the stories within the stories here.
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