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Death Takes a Holiday
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Garcia-Roza,
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Leon,
Donna
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Michael
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Death
Takes a Holiday
By
MARILYN STASIO
Published:
August 29, 2004
LTHOUGH
I haven't yet made a trip abroad because of something I read
in a detective story, I can't say I haven't been tempted.
Mysteries set in faraway places make me want to toss some
clothes in a bag and take off at dawn for:
.
. . Cuba, Jose Latour's ''Havana World Series'' in hand, to
imagine that wild time when American mobsters were fighting
over control of the casinos and making bets on everything but
a political coup.
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.
. . the sleepy back-country township in South Africa where
Thobela Mpayipheli, a onetime government agent who has
reinvented himself as a peaceable man, is reluctantly coaxed
back into action in Deon Meyer's ''Heart of the
Hunter.''
.
. . the shady precincts of modern-day Shanghai patrolled by
Chief Inspector Chen and fellow officers charged with
investigating politically sensitive crimes in Qiu Xiaolong's
''When Red Is Black.''
.
. . Brazil, clutching ''Southwesterly Wind,'' the latest
mystery in a beguiling series by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, in
the hope of catching Inspector Espinosa on one of his
meditative walks through Rio.
.
. . and, in a fanciful moment, time travel to the Australian
city of Melbourne in the 1920's, the setting for Kerry
Greenwood's ''Murder in Montparnasse'' and other whimsical
mysteries in a series featuring a fashionable liberated
woman, Phryne Fisher, as amateur sleuth.
But
my first stop would have to be Italy, which teems with
resident mystery writers. Although they view their respective
regions from a morbid perspective, acute observers like
Magdalen Nabb (in Florence), Donna Leon (in Venice), Andrea
Camilleri (in Sicily) and Michael Dibdin (who won't stay put)
are vivid chroniclers of the daily drama of life and death.
And while their sleuths are no less familiar than Virgil with
the infernal darkness of the national soul, they make more
cheerful tour guides. Their Italian detectives are pensive
souls who ponder cases over robust meals in noisy trattorias
and refer to Cicero for insights into the human condition.
Actually, Andrea Camilleri's cop, Inspector Salvo Montalbano,
is more partial to Sicilian philosophers like Giovanni
Gentile, and in ''The Terra-Cotta Dog'' he declares himself
''deeply moved'' by fried mullet, boiled squid and poached
baby octopus. Michael Dibdin's urban investigator, Aurelio
Zen, out of his element!
in the northern reaches of the Dolomites in
''Medusa,'' struggles to understand the archaic Ladino
dialect and has even more trouble digesting the region's
smoked meats and gamy stews.
Italian
sleuths are also great walkers, invariably taking the most
scenic route on their way to break the news to some poor old
widow that her good-for-nothing son has been arrested for
murder. Ardent admirers of all things beautiful, they will
often stop to look at the frescoes in a church. In ''Uniform
Justice,'' Donna Leon's sleuth, Commissario Guido Brunetti,
even exchanges greetings with a mynah bird in a pet
shop.
The
point, of course, is that these fictional detectives and
amateur sleuths are naturally inquisitive and supremely
perceptive. They know their territory intimately and study it
obsessively, alert to the slightest signs of change -- and
danger. Kurt Wallander, the melancholy police inspector in
Henning Mankell's Swedish procedurals, is an eloquent
ruminator on the creeping evils of the postmodern era.
''What's happening to the world?'' he demands in ''Firewall''
when two teenage girls show no remorse after killing a taxi
driver. Karin Fossum's ''Don't Look Back'' asks the same
question in neighboring Norway when the murder of a
well-liked girl awakens the residents of a picturesque
village to a chilling fact: there are no more islands of
tranquillity in a changing world. ''They hug their children
close, and nothing feels safe anymore.''
Scandinavian
cops may be the most morose of an angst-ridden breed, but
they aren't alone. Fictional police officers throughout the
world are shaking their heads over criminal behavior that
would have been inconceivable to earlier generations.
Investigating the murders of two illegal Albanian immigrants
in Petros Markaris's ''Deadline in Athens,'' Inspector Costas
Haritos visits the street where the couple lived and is
stunned by their neighbors' blatant bigotry. ''Why all this
fuss about two Albanians?'' demands the owner of a grocery
store. ''After all, with two Albanians less and another one
in prison, Greece is a better place.''
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