Time was when historical fiction conjured images of ruff collars and doublets, with characters saying ‘Prithee Sir’ a lot. Nowadays, the range of featured period settings has expanded unrecognisably, though a new favourite has emerged – the second world war, where Nazis stand in for nefarious noblemen.
The Darkest Winter by Carlo Lucarelli, translated by Joseph Farrell (Open Borders Press, £18.99), is one such addition, though an unusual one. It is set in Bologna in 1944, the vicious period after Italy’s first surrender, Mussolini’s capture and daring escape, and the invasion by Nazi troops to counter the Allies’ advance from the south. The protagonist is named De Luca, a former police detective who enjoys a near-legendary reputation but who has now been pressed into service in the fascist regime’s ‘political police’. He loathes this new role, and tries to ignore the screams of those being tortured in the dungeons of the building where he works.
When three separate murders are uncovered in rapid succession, however, De Luca is able to exercise his former skills. Bologna proves a perilous place to operate, as De Luca faces threats not only from the partisans active in the city but also from the invading Germans, who show very little leniency to the local fascisti, since in their eyes they are just another bunch of hopeless Italians. They do not hesitate to pressure De Luca to solve the murder of a German soldier (one of the three victims), warning him that failure to find the culprit will result in the arbitrary execution of ten Italians.
Throughout the novel, we receive only minimal information about De Luca’s personal life, other than that he sleeps alone in the barracks at the top of his office quarters. He is focused exclusively on the murder cases. The writing is chilling in its clinical depiction of him going about his work, and the drabness of wintertime Bologna is finely drawn – ‘like a souk, an old, filthy kasbah of dirty snow’. The occasional awkwardness of the translation reinforces the strangeness of Bologna in the last year of the war. The research that must have been required for the book’s wealth of detail is remarkable, and its fruits are helpfully contained in a lengthy glossary at the back – usually an annoying feature, but in this case ably reinforcing the factual basis of a marvellous novel.
To the invading Germans, the local fascisti are just another bunch of hopeless Italians
The setting of Andrew Taylor’s A Schooling in Murder (Hemlock Press, £20) – a girl’s English boarding school near Gloucester – could not be more different. It represents a new departure for this gifted thriller writer, and takes place while the war is winding down in spring 1945, between VE and VJ days. The protagonist, a teacher at the school named Annabel Warnock, has been pushed off a cliff to her death. She exists in the story as a ghost, who is intent on uncovering her killer. Invisible to all the other characters, Annabel is able to communicate with a male teacher who has come to take her place on the staff, but only when he is at work on the detective novel he is trying to write. Though there is little of the sinister political violence of The Darkest Winter, this is not an addition to the swelling ranks of cosy crime fiction. To have a novel told by a ghost is, on the surface, a preposterous conceit, but one that the veteran Taylor pulls off with considerable aplomb and with the narrative skill his readers have come to expect.
Mark Ezra’s A Sting in the Tale (No Exit Press, £9.99) begins with Felicity Jardine, a seventysomething retired intelligence officer, preparing to drown herself. Her plan is interrupted when, mid-river, she spies a baby’s car seat coming downstream with a sleeping baby on board. Objectively, this is about as likely a proposition as Taylor’s ghost, but once even provisionally accepted, it lays the ground for the rollicking present-day story that follows, as Felicity tries to discover who the parents are and who else is looking for the child.
Alternating with this plot is a series of extensive flashbacks – to Bonn in the 1970s, where, while working for MI6, Felicity has been placed in a German government job, posing as an Austrian. A female colleague is being wooed by a handsome Englishman, but Felicity rightly suspects that he is working for the Russians and getting the colleague to pass on confidential information.
The link between Felicity’s past in Bonn and the arrival of the baby in her life is smoothly made, and there are many inventive scenes, including a quite horrific case of frost burn that saves Felicity’s life. It’s a well-written book, punchy throughout.
The eponymous hero of Graham Hurley’s Kane (Head of Zeus, £20) works in the United States Secret Service, guarding Franklin D. Roosevelt when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. The Roosevelts figure prominently in the novel, as Kane has a younger sister who is struck down by polio, much like the president. Other historical characters make fleeting appearances, including Winston Churchill, who proves a boorish and demanding White House guest.
The action moves to the west coast and Los Angeles, where Kane is sent to commission a quantity of $1,000 bills from a talented counterfeiter. The bogus dollars will be used to bribe the French admiral, François Darlan, who is wavering between his superiors in Vichy France and the Republicans in exile under de Gaulle.
Soon Kane finds himself confronting a Mexican gangster named Cuesta, who abducts the woman Kane has set his heart on. The anti-Japanese hysteria of Californians in the wake of Pearl Harbor is well evoked, and it makes a welcome change for Hollywood to enjoy only a minor role in a Los Angeles setting. More adventure story than mystery, the novel has scenes of great violence, but its characters are lively and distinctive and the writing is first-rate throughout. There is, oddly, a lengthy coda which takes Kane to North Africa to help protect Darlan. Misplaced though this addendum seems, it does suggest a sequel to come – revealing, one hopes, the same imaginative energy on display here.
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