UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Donna Leon, Death at La Fenice (1992)

            Death at La Fenice is the first mystery in Donna Leon's series about Guido Brunetti, a police commissario in Venice. Brunetti investigates the death of a famous conductor, poisoned during a performance of La Traviata at the Venice opera house La Fenice.

            Before we're even a quarter of the way through the book, Leon has woven a blanket of suspicion large enough to cover most of the people we've met and some we haven't yet. The soprano and her lesbian lover have lied about their last contact with the maestro, whose homophobia may also implicate the director and his lover as well. The dead man's second wife was a suicide, and the children of that marriage are now grown. The present wife, much younger than the conductor, is a natural suspect, and several burglaries at one of the maestro's apartments, resulting in large insurance settlements, hint that a lot of inheritance money is at stake. By the time he has learned this much, Brunetti isn't even halfway through the first full day of the case.

            Brunetti concentrates on the personality of the dead man: “the answer always lay there,” he thinks. He mistrusts intuition and hunches about a suspect. Unlike so many detective characters, Brunetti's home life is happy and provides a center for him. He struggles with an arrogant superior and some incompetent subordinates, but on the whole moves fairly smoothly through his world, where he can shift easily from the Venice dialect called Veneziano to a more widely-used standard Italian and even to competent English.

            Donna Leon is a transplant to Venice—she's a New Yorker who taught in various schools abroad before settling in Venice for thirty years; she still spends many weeks there each year. The mystery story is used to this sort of cultural appropriation: the first detective stories, about a French detective in Paris, were written by an American who had never been there. Since Poe, we've had white Australians writing about aborigine detectives, Anglos writing about southwestern American Indian detectives, Belgians writing about French detectives, Englishwomen writing about Belgian detectives, and so on and so on.

            Leon does very well at lightly sketching the beauty and interest of Venice, especially its foggy mysteriousness in November, when the story takes place. And she deals well with Italian daily life, the Italians' love of titles (Brunetti's father-in-law is a count), the swarm of daily newspapers representing each demographic group and every shade of political opinion, the corruption that pervades Italy's bureaucracy, and the way the pace of Italian life is measured by meals in restaurants and homes, coffee breaks in cafes, and drinks taken at various hours at parties, bars, apartments, and even the dressing rooms at the opera house, Teatro La Fenice. Brunetti is a likable character in a picturesque setting; if you like him, there are thirty-one more books in the series.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: C[harles]. Daly King, The Curious Mr. Tarrant (1935)

            Eight stories narrated by the athletic Jerry Phelan, who meets Trevis Tarrant in the first story, “The Codex Curse,” when they are both locked into a room in the Metropolitan Museum trying to keep an Aztec Codex from being stolen. They fail, but not to worry, because Tarrant knows who took it and how to recover it.

            Tarrant prefers to call these “episodes,” the word “case” being “too formal an expression for his activities. He is not a detective, but looks for “apparently inexplicable problems” which he solves by a rigorous adherence to the doctrine of causation. Jerry remembers his experience with Tarrant and reaches out to him in the second episode. “The Tangible Illusion” is one oppressing Valerie Mopish, soon to be Mrs. Phelan. Tarrant and Katoh move in to Valerie’s “modernistic” house, built for her by her brother. Katoh is Tarrant’s Japanese butler/valet, who is a doctor at home in Japan and a spy in the States. It turns out the brother may have been less than all right that Valerie got all the money when the parents died.

            “The Nail and the Requiem” is a locked room murder mystery, and Tarrant solves it by the process of elimination: if the murderer couldn’t have gotten out…. “Torment IV” is a boat, and it may or may not have other characteristics in common with the infamous Mary Celeste.

            The only stories that can be recommended are in this first half of the book; skip the first one and read the next three.

            “The Headless Horrors” is a silly story about voodoo ritual beheading. “The Vanishing Harp” is a slow-moving story, another locked-room puzzle, but not a murder, though an attempted one, and at the end Tarrant gives the miscreant the “honorable” way out. “The Man with Three Eyes” does a classic sleight-of-hand move in diverting attention from the obvious answer to a murder committed in plain sight—almost—with several witnesses. This story is also probably worth reading. But the final episode, “The Final Bargain,” goes off into la-la land with twisted auras causing paralysis and Tarrant pledging to go away for seven years as some kind of bargain to save Jerry’s sister Mary, who loves Tarrant and vice-versa.

            This collection made it into Ellery Queen’s list of the most important detective and crime fiction short stories.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Henry Kisor, Season’s Revenge: A Christmas Mystery (2003)

 

            I picked up Henry Kisor’s mystery called Season’s Revenge because I had read a book by this author before. Henry Kisor, who was for many years the book review editor of the Chicago Sun Times, learned to fly a small plane in his middle age.  Kisor had been reluctant to take flying lessons earlier because he is deaf; when he was in his fifties, though, he went flying with a friend who is a deaf pilot, and realized it was possible. His book, The Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet, recounts Kisor’s recreation of the first transcontinental flight early in the last century. His book struck a chord with me, since I didn’t learn to fly until I was sixty.

            I called this series “Uncommon Mysteries,” and this one qualifies: the detective is a Lakota Sioux Indian with a Mexican name whose beat is in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and who investigates a murder where the weapon was a black bear.  There are some other surprises I won’t give away.  This is the first of six mysteries Kisor has written about Steve Martinez, in the sheriff’s department of Porcupine County. Martinez was adopted as a youngster and raised in a white household. He looks like an Indian but thinks like a white. He knows the Upper Peninsula is ancestral Sioux land and feels its appeal, but he’s also too modern and rational to believe in this ancestral bond. Kisor has admitted in interviews that this biracial or bicultural tug on his main character comes from his own sense of living in two different cultures:  the hearing and the deaf.

            Kisor peoples his fictional Porcupine County with believable folks, including the head of the local historical society, who provides romantic interest for Steve Martinez.

            One aspect of the mystery is the curious historical fact that in the 1930s, Soviet Russia recruited hundreds of Finnish-American Upper Peninsula residents to emigrate to Karelia, a Finnish-speaking part of the Soviet Union. These people expected to get good jobs in Karelia and send money home, but a lot of them simply disappeared, and in Michigan their relatives who were left behind were unable to pay mortgages and lost their homes to land grabbers during the Depression.

            The subtitle A Christmas Mystery, is a little misleading, since the crime, though solved at Christmastime, takes place months earlier, and the action of the book covers almost half a year. But it ends with snow and Christmas lights. Merry Christmas, mystery lovers.