Tangled Web UK Review April 2012
Death and the Olive Grove (Inspector Bordelli 2) [Kindle Edition] by
Marco Vichi
pbk out January 12
(Hodder)
at £9.99
This is an English translation of an Italian novel the second in the Inspector
Bordelli series. It might be called a down-market version of Donna Leon's Commissario
Brunetti series, in that the detective is more seedy than the upright family man
in Venice. Bordelli works in Florence and is cast in the mould of so many detectives
in continental European novels; they are often divorced or widowed, they live
in relative squalor, smoke incessantly, drink a lot and spend much of their time
in bars with their assistants, eating or talking about food. They are rebellious
mavericks, contemptuous of their boss and unwilling to stick to the rules. I've
read several Italian and Spanish crime books lately which are almost interchangeable
in these respects.
Here in 1964, our inspector finds one of his informers, a dwarf, murdered in
an olive grove next to a large mansion, occupied by a mysterious German, but his
attention is diverted by a series of distressing child murders, where each girl
is strangled in a park and is then bitten on the belly. Bordelli spends most of
his time driving around Florence in his ancient VW Beetle, without seemingly much
plan of campaign. There are numerous interviews with people which seem quite irrelevant
to the story-line, but of course he gets there in the end. One annoyance to the
reader is the fact that he lights a cigarette at least once a page and stubs it
out after a few lines of dialogue, withut having time to have more than a few
drags, these mundane operations being described each time. He also has a touch
of the 'car syndrome', where he describes putting the car into gear and releasing
the clutch – I read another European book not long ago where every gear-change
was meticulously described, something which I do not need to know.
The translation is excellent, but one can always sense the fact the author is
not writing in his native language. Here I doubt if an Italian police inspector
would use some of the English idioms given to him to utter – no doubt there
are Italian equivalents, but when the whole atmosphere is created is Florentine,
these anglicisations tend to jar a little.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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