Michael Vestey

Death in Venice

Death in Venice

When you are so addicted to writers’ works and feel bereft after finishing all their novels, you become restless and fretful. It happened to me last year with the Aurelio Zen detective novels of Michael Dibdin, as I lamented in The Spectator Diary column. Zen is the Italian policeman who is sent to different parts of Italy to solve crimes sensitive in nature; he’s a louche, corner-cutting cop with a hopeless domestic life. When I’d read the last novel, I wondered listlessly what I’d do until the next Zen book, which I surmised would be in two years’ time. And so it is: another is promised for August.

Bit of a sad case, you might think; yes, probably, and I’m not, as a rule, even a particular fan of the genre. Apart from the fine writing and ingenious plotting, I can only assume it must be my interest in all things Italian. But then came rescue. I was idling in the bookshop at Rome’s Ciampino airport waiting for a cheap flight to Stansted, when I noticed a paperback novel by Donna Leon about a Venetian detective called Commissario Guido Brunetti. That was it: I was off again. I bought another and 14 novels later I am once again back in my post-Dibdin state of frustration and impatience, with perhaps another 18 months to wait for the next Brunetti. So, it was with some excitement that I spotted Radio Four’s dramatisation of one of her early novels, The Death of Faith, broadcast last weekend as The Saturday Play. It did not disappoint.

Leon writes with great literary panache and evocative power about the world’s most beautiful and mysterious city — the hardbacks of the Brunetti novels even carry maps of Venice so that we anoraks can follow the detective’s progress from his office at the police HQ, the Questura, to, say, the Accademia vaporetto stop, or his route home to the other side of the Grand Canal, where he lives with his left-wing wife Paola and two teenage children Chiara and Raffi (for once in crime fiction a detective is happily married), or as he orders a police launch to take him and his trustworthy junior officer, Vianello, across the lagoon to a crime scene on one of the islands.

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