The satisfaction in reading murder mysteries comes from the solutions. Having a believable answer is more important than the type of murder or who solves it. A column by Amanda Taub in the New York Times, which I referenced in a recent post, described the appeal perfectly. “The heart of this genre is not the murders that precipitate the plot,” wrote Taub, “but the process by which they are solved—and, above all, the promise that they will be.”

“The Detection Club, a literary society, was formed in 1930 by a group of prominent British mystery writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton. Members had to swear an oath promising that their fictional detectives ‘shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them,’ and that their mystery solutions would never rely on ‘Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God.‘

It’s a telling promise: No one cared what kinds of crimes were to be solved, or who was to solve them. But when it came to the process of solving the crimes, rules were rules.“

That post led to a conversation with a friend who suggested that for a number of readers of this genre, the other promise that goes unspoken is that the killer will get their “just rewards.” The Old Testament part of our brain, it seems, wants everyone (or at least everyone else) to get what they deserve.

True justice is when you reap what you sow. The tyrannical ruler who terrorizes the people should not die of old age while asleep in their bed.

My friend noted that there were discussions around how some of the more modern mystery writers, like Donna Leon, wrote stories that might not fulfill this second, unspoken promise and have less satisfying endings. I actually touched on this point in my earlier review of Leon’s Death in a Strange Country. As one gets closer to the end of that work, we fear that Commissario Guido Brunetti’s great detective work will come to naught when faced with the might of the military-industrial complex. However, a distraught and vengeful Sicilian mother provides some small sense of justice in this world of deceit and destruction of things beautiful and meaningful. Yet in the end, the underlying forces were not changed with the comeuppance of that one killer.

Which brings me to my most recent descent into the murder mystery genre.

Willful Behavior (2018) by Donna Leon is the eleventh in what is now a 33-book series featuring the Venetian detective Guido Brunetti. The story begins as Brunetti receives a visit from one of his wife’s students “with a strange and vague interest in investigating the possibility of a pardon for a crime committed by her grandfather many years ago.” At first the detective dismisses it even as he is intrigued by the student’s “intelligence and moral conscience.” Soon, however, the girl is found stabbed to death, and Claudia Leonardo becomes Brunetti’s next case.

At one point Claudia, who seems to have no living family members, lived with an elderly Austrian woman—Hedwig “Heidi” Jacobs—who has an extraordinary art collection. Soon after Claudia’s murder Signora Jacobs is also found dead. The plot twists and turns and Brunetti begins to unlock long buried secrets of Nazi collaboration and the exploitation of Italian Jews during World War II, “secrets few in Italy want revealed.”

I turned to this particular work because I have been thinking of secret (and sometimes not so secret) collaborations in our own time. This work of fiction brought forward much to ponder as we grapple with our own age of authoritarianism and oligarchy. Thankfully, we have the opportunity to consider these thoughts while reading Leon’s compelling narrative that brings the reader along page-after-page.

Once again we meet the cast of characters who make up Brunetti’s life: his vain and pompous superior, Giuseppe Patta; his fellow policeman, the recently promoted Detective Inspector Lorenzo Vianello; the ever-resourceful secretary Elettra Zorzi, a woman of “endless and instinctive deceit” who always finds a way to get the information Brunetti needs as long as he isn’t too squeamish about her methods; the medical examiner Ettore Rizzardi; Paola Falier, Brunetti’s wife and a university lecturer in English Literature who is a delightful and loving foil for her husband; Paola’s father and Brunetti’s father-in-law, the wealthy and connected Orazio Falier; and his children Raffaele and Chiara. Leon once said that she wrote Brunetti’s character so that she would like him, and the reader quickly comes to the same conclusion.

Without giving away the plot, it is fair to say that Leon has once again written a masterful mystery where the killer is found, but the underlying issues that led to the murders go unaddressed. The Times of London had an excellent description of the challenge in her books.

“What makes Leon’s work especially unnerving is the sense that corruption is a continuing process. . . . This is a powerful story, brilliantly evoking Venetian atmosphere, and the characters of Brunetti and his family continue to deepen throughout the series.” 

A very worthwhile read.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Leonardo Yip on Unsplash