The hooligan and the psychopath

A Season with Verona (2002), Tim Parks’s account of a year on tour with the Italian football club Hellas Verona’s notorious travelling fans (motto ‘we have a dream in our heads, to burn the south’), contains a memorable scene in which Parks spots a teenage boy screaming abuse at some rival supporters before returning to the mobile to assure his mother that, no, they don’t have much homework that weekend. Here, doubtless, was the raw material for 17-year-old Hellas fan Mauro Duckworth, whose absence from his father’s investiture with the honorary freedom of the city is explained by his confinement in a Brescia police cell after a pitched battle with the local constabulary.

Mauro’s impending court case is, we rapidly infer, not the least of his 55-year-old multiple-murderer parent’s worries, for Verona, so long amenable to the furtherance of his schemes, looks to be closing ranks against him. His plan to sponsor an art exhibition on the theme of ‘Painting Death’ is being stymied by the local museum director, Dr Volpi. His student daughter, Massimina, is bedroom-bound on social media, and his ever more pious wife is locked in the metaphorical arms of her confessor. To make matters worse, the investiture marks the return into Duckworth senior’s life of Stan Albertini, who knows far too much about his friend’s past to be allowed to remain alive.

Parks’s Maurice Duckworth novels — comic thrillers, built on the absence of a moral core — draw their vitality from at least three different sources. The first is the reader’s growing awareness of a back-story crammed with the ghosts of knocked-off wives and business partners. The second is Maurice’s reliability, or lack of it, as a witness. The third is the thoroughness of the detail with which Parks invests his account of Veronese life: the Northern League busily infiltrating the council chamber; His Eminence intimidating the traffic cops; and rats lurking in every bureaucratic arras.