“The third gong, announcing the opera was about to continue, sounded discreetly through the lobbies and bars of Teatro La Fenice.”
This is the first of the Commissario Brunetti mystery novels, which take place in Venice, and follow Commissario Brunetti as he solves various crimes. You know the drill. There are 32! of these novels now since they first started getting published in the early 1990s. I read a middle one of these awhile back and really liked it, and I don’t think I could possibly commit to 30 more of them, but they’re relatively compact and singular, so I think picking them up from time to time seems fine to me. If I needed a book and I saw one of these on a beachhouse bookshelf I think I would feel pretty good about things.
In this first novel, we begin at the opera where a production of Traviata in swing. Suddenly the elderly conductor, a world-renowned conductor from Austria who lives in Venice for the time being collapses and dies. Eventually, the performance commences after the scene is cleared. The autopsy shows that the conductor has died from cyanide poisoning, and Commissario Brunetti must solve things. He takes his time and begins the interview process. We learn at one point that he doesn’t like intuition, but rather strict and careful police work. I think we are meant to see him as an opposite to someone like Poirot, and perhaps more like Maigret. But he’s a much gentler soul that Maigret ultimately. We also get a bit from his personal life in this novel as the rarefied social circle of the Venice opera means he must ask to schmooze with his in-laws’ crowd (rich, aristocratic).
One thing I like here is that yes, as soon as you hear about cyanide, especially in a first mystery, you must think about The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and you are rewarded for your thinking with a little nudge in the early chapters. The implication is that perhaps the killer also thought about Christie’s first novel for their inspiration as well.
The Debutante
If you’ve read Jon Ronson’s older stuff from the 1990s you’ll recall that he spent much of that time reporting on rightwing and libertarian figures. There’s a scene in his book Them where he’s running around in the late 1990s with a quite young Alex Jones. Alex Jones is not as old as you would guess, but he’s been at this for a long time.
In this podcast published on Audible, Jon Ronson is tapping back into this time period and this early part of his career for a short piece on a woman who presents some mystery to the contemporary world. She was a debutante as a teen, and then somehow got pulled into the world of Neo-Nazi Christian White Nationalism maybe as a dare, maybe as a goof, maybe as a true believer, and maybe as a kind of cult-like disposition. Regardless, she finds herself involved in an abusive relationship with a rightwing media figure (not very well known nationally) who has connections to that very 1990s scene of domestic terrorism. According to her story and the podcast, she becomes a federal informant and supplies valuable information to tracking down the suspects in the Oklahoma City bombing. But there’s also a possible implication that she was more involved than she lets on or has more culpability, and even maybe that not all the suspects were caught, even though the case officially closed.
In a way this reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Mother Night in which a media figure (a Tokyo Rose like figure) is also a intelligence agent, but the case is so secret that he can’t even be allowed to prove his innocence, and begins to doubt his innocence.
The Machine Stops
Another long story that I end up teaching a lot, so I keep reading it and rereading it. It’s a dystopian story where all humans (well the ones within the system) like in a singular cell by themselves with a desk and a chair and a series of buttons that allow them to control everything about the room that they might need. They can bring in music or games or literature, all that. They can call anyone in the whole world, they can lead lectures, and they can learn about anything they want. They’re even allowed to travel to other places and see people, but that takes time, and well, why go do those things if you have everything you need?
The story involves Vashti, an older women, who takes a call from her son Kuno who wants to see her. You can see me, she suggests, but he means face to face. She eventually agrees, and she finds that he has been to the surface and seen that people still live there. He also knows that the giant machine that controls everything and is the thing that she treats as a god will soon stop, lurching everyone out.
In so many ways, this is a proto-dystopian novel, almost purely allegorical but it’s fascinating. EM Forster has not written the best dystopian story ever, but he might be the best writer to ever write a dystopian story, and that’s something.
