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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Using Bobby Mahon as the central character around whom most of the action revolves, Irish debut novelist Donal Ryan writes a dramatic and affecting experimental novel in which the story and its symbols, such as the “spinning heart” on his father’s gate, evolve through the points of view of twenty-one different characters, all of them living in the same town, knowing the same people, and contributing to the network of rumors and innuendos as members of “the Teapot Taliban,” as one character calls them. The father of Pokey Burke describes his two sons – Eamonn, his first son, whom he loves more than his second son, Pokey, whom he has spoiled over the years to make up for his lack of affection for him. Pokey’s father, Joseph, now blames himself, in part, for the economic problems now affecting so many families in the village. The village’s young men, in particular, have especially serious problems during the recession, since they often feel that their efforts have been betrayed and their manhood has been compromised. The breezy, casual, and sometimes highly confidential stories the characters share with the reader range from darkly humorous to frightening, reflecting the uncertainties of life itself and the often dominating role played by the church and by the characters’ unresolved issues regarding sex.
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In this uniquely Irish combination of satire and morality tale, author Claire Kilroy introduces the young, alcoholic thirteenth Earl of Howth, who is testifying in a 2016 legal case about the “Celtic Tiger” and the Irish real estate “bubble” from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, a case in which he was an active, but naïve, participant. Summoned to court years later, Tristram St. Lawrence gives evidence for ten days between March 10, 2016, and March 24, 2016, his whereabouts a mystery from the time of the real estate crash to the much later trial. Though he was personally involved in several enormous real estate schemes during the height of the action, he was, from the outset, a front man – a figurehead whom M. Deauville, a mysterious foreign investor, chose for his noble background and the presumed legitimacy his title would bestow on the projects being undertaken by Castle Holdings, domiciled in the thousand-year-old castle in Howth owned by Tristram’s father. Author Claire Kilroy presents Tristram’s story as part satire and part morality tale, a style which makes it possible for the reader to recognize how vulnerable, and almost cartoon-like, Tristram is. Though no reader will take Tristram seriously, most readers will be empathetic as they recognize how he is manipulated on his step-by-step journey to disaster. Entertaining and enlightening.
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Twenty-five years ago Jimmy Rabbitte and his mates in the working class Barrytown section of Dublin, decided that the best way to change their economic situation for the better was to form a rock band. In the first novel of the Barrytown Trilogy (1988), named The Commitments for the rock group they formed, Jimmy and his hopeful friends tried for big-time success, and in the trilogy’s subsequent novels (The Snapper and The Van), they continued their earnest and energetic, though unsophisticated, plans to improve their lives. Now, after twenty-five years and four children, Jimmy has achieved modest success in the music business, though not as a performer, and in his new novel, The Guts, he revisits many aspects of his life, his family, and his friendships as he evaluates where he is in the Grand Scheme of his own grand schemes over the years. The Guts is hilariously funny and filled with humor that ranges from the dark to the most boisterous and profane, but it also shows an older, more thoughtful Jimmy whose life has taken a sudden turn in a new direction: Jimmy has just learned that he has cancer. Despite the fact that the subject of cancer dominates the novel, Doyle keeps the action flying, and at no time does the mood ever flag or descend to the maudlin.
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