Review: THE NAMESAKE by Conor Fitzgerald

Commissario Alec Blume returns for a third time in Conor Fitzgerald’s THE NAMESAKE (Bloomsbury, £11.99). Blume is American-born, but has lived in Italy since his teens, which gives him an unusual take on the country: he retains his outsider’s eye for Italy’s beauty and foibles, while at the same time he is embedded enough to be fully aware of its social and cultural intricacies.
  The novel opens with the apparent kidnapping of a teenage girl, and Fitzgerald sets the tone with his very first line: ‘Before we begin,’ said the magistrate, ‘I want you all to know that there is no chance of a happy ending to this story.’
  Shortly afterwards, an insurance agent is found murdered - an insurance agent who has the great misfortune to have the same name as a magistrate who is investigating a high-ranking member of the Ndrangheta, or Calabrian mafia.
  Blume’s own investigations into the case, alongside his subordinate and lover, Caterina, are hampered when he is contacted by one of the many shadowy Italian secret service agencies. It appears that the Ndrangheta is investigating Agazio Curmaci, a Calabrian operating in Germany, and is doing so in tandem with the German secret service. Blume is asked to travel to the south of Italy with a rogue Italian agent who is tracking Curmaci, and who may well be intent on personal vengeance.
  THE NAMESAKE is as much an exploration of the social, cultural and political factors that led to the rise of the Ndrangheta as it is a conventional police procedural, and it is dense with detail about an organisation that is far more secretive than the mafia, yet has vast power and reach. For example, the book suggests that in 2008, when the credit crunch struck Italy with surprising speed, it was to the cash-based organisation the Ndrangheta that the authorities turned for the liquidity required to keep the economy on an even keel.
  There’s a playful quality to the form of this novel, as evolves from a police procedural into something of a spy novel when Blume joins an undercover agent as he penetrates the Calabrian heartland. This may well offend those crime and mystery purists who don’t believe in genre cross-fertilisation, but it works very well in context, particularly as Blume himself is very much a secretive, taciturn and self-possessed operator.
  Exquisitely written in a quietly elegant style, and dotted with nuggets of coal-black humour, THE NAMESAKE is a bold blend of genre conventions that confirms Fitzgerald’s growing reputation as an author whose novels comfortably straddle the increasingly fine line between crime and literary fiction. - Declan Burke

A Blume By Any Other Name

I was mightily impressed with Conor Fitzgerald’s debut, THE DOGS OF ROME, when it appeared last year. Domiciled in Rome for the past few decades, Fitzgerald writes about Commissario Alec Blume, an American-born, Rome-based police detective who has the insider’s track on Italian crime and an outsider’s eye for the good, bad and ugly in Italian life. A terrific thriller, THE DOGS OF ROME was notable for the elegance of its language, so it wasn’t a huge surprise to learn that Conor Fitzgerald is a pseudonym for Conor Deane, who is the son of the noted Irish poet, Seamus Deane.
  THE DOGS OF ROME, by the way, was last week shortlisted for a John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger by the Crime Writers’ Association.
  I sat down with Conor Fitzgerald a few weeks ago to interview him for the Sunday Independent, this to mark the publication of the second Alec Blume novel, THE FATAL TOUCH, and a very pleasant couple of hours it proved too. First let me say that, as fine a novel as THE DOGS OF ROME is, THE FATAL TOUCH represents something of a leap forward for Fitzgerald, even if it is only his second offering. My review of it is here, with the gist running thusly:

“Beautifully written, the story proceeds at a stately pace which disguises an exquisitely complex plot, as Blume delicately negotiates the labyrinth that is Roman policing. Fitzgerald has an elegant, spare style that straddles both the literary and crime genres, and the style is perfectly pitched to reflect Blume’s own world-weariness.”

  Marilyn Stasio, writing in the New York Times, liked it too; clickety-click here for more …
  Anyway, what was particularly interesting about the interview, for me at least, was Conor Fitzgerald’s comment on how his writing career was influenced by his father, the poet - although not necessarily in the way you might expect. To wit:

“My father’s an extremely clever man, he really is,” says Conor, “but at some stage in his life he decided that the only things that were really interesting were detective novels and football […] In the pre-Amazon days, he used to send me books in the post. With poetry, for example, he’d always say, ‘This guy is very good, but ...’ and he’d make some observation, which could be political, or academic, literary, or simply in bad taste. With the crime novels, he’d just say, ‘This is brilliant’.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE FATAL TOUCH by Conor Fitzgerald

Set in Rome, but featuring an American-born Italian police detective, and written by an Irishman, THE FATAL TOUCH is Conor Fitzgerald’s sequel to last year’s debut, THE DOGS OF ROME, which garnered him comparisons with the late Michael Dibdin, who along with Donna Leon had virtually cornered the market on English-language crime fiction set in Italy until his untimely death.
  ‘Conor Fitzgerald’, by the way, is a pseudonym for Conor Fitzgerald Deane; the author is the son of poet and academic, Seamus Deane. Intriguingly for a man who has previously translated Joycean academic work, Fitzgerald has given his protagonist the name Blume.
  Here Commissario Alec Blume investigates the murky world of art forgery, aided and abetted by his colleague Caterina Mattiola, former policeman Beppe Paolini, the mysterious Colonel Farinelli, and the memoirs left behind by a dead forger, the Irish artist-in-exile Henry Treacy.
  Beautifully written, the story proceeds at a stately pace which disguises an exquisitely complex plot, as Blume delicately negotiates the labyrinth that is Roman policing. Fitzgerald has an elegant, spare style that straddles both the literary and crime genres, and the style is perfectly pitched to reflect Blume’s own world-weariness.
  Despite his cynicism, however, one of Blume’s chief virtues is his laconic sense of humour, which gives rise to deliciously dry and deadpan observations on virtually every page, most of them at Blume’s own expense.
  Blume is a loner, an outsider and a potential alcoholic, but Fitzgerald cleverly reworks the police procedural’s conventions, much as the forger Treacy pays homage to the Old Masters, and makes a distinctive hero of Blume, particularly in terms of his ability to not only adjust to the corruption that is integral to Italian policing, but to employ it on his own terms. This is a particularly clever twist, as the world is fully aware that corruption is endemic to Italian public life, but this is the first time I’ve come across a character proactively employing corruption as a policing tool.
  Meanwhile, Treacy’s memoirs provide a secondary narrative strand that is equally compelling, and which neatly feed into the main story despite Treacy’s penchant for baroque and self-serving prose. Treacy’s journals, of which there are extensive excerpts, put me in mind of John Banville’s THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE, had Freddie Montgomery turned to art forgery rather than murder.
  The character of Colonel Farinelli is also an intriguing one. A corpulent sybarite, he carries a whiff of cordite wherever he goes. Formerly a powerful policeman, he has long since been shunted out of the corridors of power, due to a murky past in which he was involved, unsuccessfully, in attempting to secure the release of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, who was abducted and subsequently murdered by the Red Brigade in 1978.
  All these elements come together in a scintillating novel which offers a compelling snapshot of contemporary Rome, courtesy of a guide, in Alec Blume, who seems set fair to become this generation’s Aurelio Zen. - Declan Burke

  Conor Fitzgerald’s THE FATAL TOUCH is published by Bloomsbury.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: McGilloway, Paretsky, Nadelson, Hiaasen and Fitzgerald

The latest of my monthly crime fiction columns for the Irish Times appeared yesterday, featuring Brian McGilloway, Sara Paretsky, Reggie Nadelson, Carl Hiaasen and Conor Fitzgerald. It ran a lot like this:

Brian McGilloway has established a strong reputation with his Donegal-set series of Inspector Devlin novels, but LITTLE GIRL LOST (Macmillan, £12.99) is a standalone set in Derry, featuring DS Lucy Black of the PSNI. While investigating a case of a missing teenager, Black discovers a younger girl wandering through a snowstorm in her pyjamas. Her reward is an unwanted transfer to the Public Protection Unit, although Black has more pressing, personal concerns: she is the prime carer for her father, a former RUC officer who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, while her ultimate superior is her mother, who walked out on Lucy’s family some decades previously. Effortlessly blending Black’s personal woes into her professional life, McGilloway weaves a taut police procedural in an unadorned style that belies the story’s complexity. With a backdrop provided by the PSNI’s ongoing evolution as a police force, and the tension inherent in the force’s attempts to police a vibrant Derry that is in the process of shaking off the shackles of its recent history, McGilloway has tapped into a fascinating and febrile setting. Black, meanwhile, is reminiscent of Jane Casey’s DC Maeve Kerrigan, a painfully self-conscious but thoroughly competent young woman whose ability to do her job has very little do with her gender. All told, it’s an impressive statement of intent from an author whose reputation grows with each successive release.
  BLOOD COUNT (Atlantic Books, £12.99) is the ninth in Reggie Nadelson’s series of Artie Cohen novels, in which the hardboiled cop investigates a series of unusual deaths in an upmarket Harlem apartment building. The fact that Artie’s on-off love interest Lily appears to be implicated in the deaths complicates matters, and renders Artie something of an ambiguous narrator, which in turn gives the reader a delicious frisson of being party to the subversion of both law and morality Nadelson unveils. It’s an issue-driven novel, as Nadelson invokes the recent history of the Soviet Union’s collapse, sleeper agents, and the complicated relationship between Communist Russia and the historically dispossessed African-Americans. The story takes place in the wake of Barack Obama’s election, which has the benefit of investing the historical elements with a contemporary immediacy, but there are times when Nadelson forsakes Artie Cohen’s hardnosed realism in order to hammer home a political message. The net result is a potentially enthralling snapshot of melting-pot New York that is at times undermined by the author’s digressions into the realms of polemic.
  Sara Paretsky is no less issue-driven in BODY WORK (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99), the 14th novel to feature her iconic private eye, VI ‘Vic’ Warshawski. An artist’s right to portray herself onstage as she sees fit leads to the murder of a young woman, and Warshawski’s investigations subsequently uncover a conspiracy of silence generated by corporate giant Tintrey, a firm which offers security consultancy in Iraq. The consequences of sending unprepared and poorly outfitted men and women to war becomes a major theme, but Paretsky is too canny to allow her political concerns to dominate the narrative at the expense of pace, story and character. Warshawski, nearing 50, is a self-described feminist and street-fighter, a very modern woman who nonetheless harks back to the classic knight errants of private detective lore, as originally created by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. The mix is a potent one, and BODY WORK confirms, yet again, Paretsky’s status as one of the great crime authors of her generation.
  STAR ISLAND (Sphere, £14.99) is Carl Hiaasen’s 12th adult crime novel, a blackly comic caper that features his recurring anti-hero Skink, the former Florida governor who now lives half-wild in the Everglades. A multi-character tale, it centres on wild-child pop star Cherry Pye and her ‘undercover stunt double’, Ann DeLuisa, who impersonates Cherry when the star is too befuddled with drugs and booze to function. Blackmail, kidnap and violence enter the picture when a sleazy paparazzo gets Cherry in his sights, and soon Hiaasen is merrily plumbing the sludgy depths of modern America as he pops off deadpan zingers at a host of targets, most notably the puddle-shallow cult of celebrity. Despite the many and (deliberately) implausible twists and turns, STAR ISLAND sticks to Hiaasen’s tried and trusted formula, delivering a polished comedy that will delight newcomers and satisfy established fans.
  Set in Rome, featuring an American-born Italian police detective, and written by an Irishman, THE FATAL TOUCH (Bloomsbury, £11.99) is Conor Fitzgerald’s sequel to last year’s debut, THE DOGS OF ROME. Commissioner Alec Blume investigates the murky world of art forgery, aided and abetted by his colleague Caterina Mattiola, former policeman Beppe Paolini, the mysterious Colonel Farenelli, and the memoirs left behind by a dead forger, the Irish artist-in-exile Henry Treacy. Beautifully written, the story proceeds at a stately pace which disguises an exquisitely complex plot, as Blume delicately negotiates the labyrinth that is Roman policing. Blume himself is a loner, an outsider and a potential alcoholic, but Fitzgerald cleverly reworks the police procedural’s conventions, much as the forger Treacy pays homage to the Old Masters, and makes a distinctive hero of Blume, particularly in terms of his ability to not only adjust to the corruption that is integral to Italian policing, but to employ it on his own terms. Chief among Blume’s virtues is his laconic sense of humour, which gives rise to deliciously dry and deadpan observations on virtually every page, most of them at Blume’s expense. Meanwhile, Treacy’s memoirs provide a secondary narrative strand that is equally compelling, and which neatly feed into the main story despite Treacy’s penchant for baroque and self-serving prose. The blend results in a scintillating novel that confirms and enhances Fitzgerald’s burgeoning reputation. - Declan Burke

  This column first appeared in the Irish Times.

When In Rome, Giggle Your Socks Off

I started Conor Fitzgerald’s THE FATAL TOUCH the other night (gorgeous cover, right), which is set in the Eternal City, and even at this early stage it’s evident that the novel is more assured than Fitzgerald’s very fine debut, THE DOGS OF ROME. That assurance manifests itself in a laconic sense of humour that knowingly undermines the crime novel’s tropes, as offered by Fitzgerald’s protagonist, Commissioner Blume:

When Grattapaglia had gone, Blume leaned back and turned his face up to the sun. “I need a job that allows me to drink coffee, eat pastries, and soak up the morning warmth. A job without people like Grattapaglia. I’d keep the dead bodies and crime victims, though. I wouldn’t have any perspective on life without them. So, what’s your impression so far?”

  And again, as Blume contemplates a locked door:

“We could go in from this side, or go back and enter through that green door. I have some picklocks in the tactical bag.”
  Blume patiently worked at the tumbler lock on the door. “Almost have it,” he said after five minutes. “I’m a bit out of practice.”
  Three minutes later he pulled out a crowbar from the same bag, stuck it into the wood frame next to the strike plate, and hurled his body against the door.

  Good, clean fun it is too, and THE FATAL TOUCH has put a wry smile on my face with virtually every page. If the rest lives up to the promise of the first 60 pages or so, it’ll be one of the finest crime novels of the year.

If The Name Fitz, Wear It

I was away last weekend, engaged in fifth wedding anniversary-related shenanigans, so I didn’t get to see Saturday’s Irish Times’ books pages until yesterday. Some very good stuff there was, too, starting with Arminta Wallace’s piece on how crime fiction set in Italy (albeit courtesy of non-Italian writers) is about to steal the limelight away from its Scandinavian counterpart. Among the writers interviewed was Conor Fitzgerald, whose THE FATAL TOUCH is published round about now. Quoth Conor:

“The Scandinavians have a good society with a nasty underbelly. In Italy it’s almost the reverse; they know they have a bad society. Usually detective fiction is about setting the world to rights, so if you place it in Italy you’ve got a problem. Crimes do not get solved; court cases never finish.”

  Wallace, by the way, also tells us that ‘Conor Fitzgerald’ is a pseudonym, and reveals the name of the author’s father, who is a famous Irish poet (hint: it’s not Seamus Heaney). For the scoop, clickety-click here …
  Elsewhere, Ed O’Loughlin’s very fine sophomore novel, TOPLOADER, was reviewed by David Park, with the gist running thusly:

“O’Louglin’s writing is consistently impressive in his descriptions of the imposition of military might and its human consequences. He is also skilled at capturing the nightmarish, terrorised topography inside the zone and the conditions that the inhabitants have to endure.”

  Park was less impressed with the comic aspects of the novel, which is a little bit odd, given that TOPLOADER is a comic novel in the vein of DR STRANGELOVE - dark and tragic, certainly, but always attuned to the absurdities of the ‘war on terror’. For what it’s worth, I read TOPLOADER with a sloppy grin pasted to my face throughout. If you remain unconvinced that the comic novel can be simultaneously funny and heartbreaking, then I recommend you read TOPLOADER.
  For the rest of the review, clickety-click here …
  Finally, Max McGuinness reviewed Hadrien Laroche’s THE LAST GENET: A WRITER IN REVOLT, which details Jean Genet’s political activism in the latter stages of his life, when he went out to bat for organisations such as the Black Panthers, the PLO and the Red Army Faction. I went through a phase of gorging on Jean Genet some years ago now, and enjoyed the vicarious wallowing in the gutter that reading Genet offers, although I wouldn’t be in any great hurry to re-read any of the novels. That said, I have a biography, THE IMAGINATION OF JEAN GENET by Joseph McMahon, sitting on the shelves, and I might be tempted to crack it open if I ever again get to the point where I have the luxury of simply reading for fun.
  Anyway, for the review of THE LAST GENET, clickety-click here …

Molto Benny

Benny Blanco, aka Benjamin Black, returns to the fray this year with A DEATH IN SUMMER, which sounds like it could be terrific fun. Quoth the blurb elves:

When newspaper magnate Richard Jewell is found dead at his country estate, clutching a shotgun in his lifeless hands, few see his demise as cause for sorrow. But before long Doctor Quirke and Inspector Hackett realise that, rather than the suspected suicide, ‘Diamond Dick’ has in fact been murdered. Jewell had made many enemies over the years and suspicion soon falls on one of his biggest rivals. But as Quirke and his assistant Sinclair get to know Jewell’s beautiful, enigmatic wife Françoise d’Aubigny, and his fragile sister Dannie, as well as those who work for the family, it gradually becomes clear that all is not as it seems. As Quirke’s investigations return him to the notorious orphanage of St Christopher’s, where he once resided, events begin to take a much darker turn. Quirke finds himself reunited with an old enemy and Sinclair receives sinister threats. But what have the shadowy benefactors of St Christopher’s to do with it all? Against the backdrop of 1950’s Dublin, Benjamin Black conjures another atmospheric, beguiling mystery.

  All of which sounds like a tongue-in-cheek Agatha Christie homage and / or parody, which would be no bad thing. And, given that John Banville toiled for many years with ink-stained fingers among the great and good of Irish journalism, it’ll be interesting to see if ‘Diamond Dick’ is modelled on any of said great and good.
  Meanwhile, and not wanting to waste a cheese-tastic Italian headline pun, Conor Fitzgerald publishes the second in his Rome-set Alec Blume series, THE FATAL TOUCH. To wit:

In the early hours of a Saturday morning, a body is discovered in Piazza de’ Renzi. If it was just a simple fall that killed him, why is a senior Carabiniere officer so interested? Commissioner Alec Blume is immediately curious and the discovery of the dead man’s notebooks reveals that there is a great deal more at stake than the unfortunate death of a down-and-out ... What secrets did he know that might have made him a target? What is the significance of the Galleria Orpiment? And why are the authorities so intent on blocking Blume’s investigations?

  I thoroughly enjoyed Fitzgerald’s debut, THE DOGS OF ROME, and I wasn’t alone. “A powerful and hugely compelling novel. Dark, worldly and written with tremendous style and assurance,” reckoned William Boyd. “The American-born Blume is an engaging hero who might just have to potential to fill the gap left when Michael Dibdin’s death ended his Italian detective Aurelio Zen’s investigations,” vouchsafed the Sunday Times. “Blumein’ marvellous,” Crime Always Pays barely restrained itself from quipping.
  Conor Fitzgerald as the new Michael Dibdin? I’ll buy that for a dollar …