The Haunted Hotel - Wilkie Collins

The Haunted Hotel (1879) is late Collins, strikingly modern in some ways, hopelessly Victorian in others. The plot is complex, bordering on soap-opera. Lord Montbarry has broken off his engagement to Anglo-Irish rose Agnes Lockwood and gone and married the racily exotic Countess Narona. His family, the many males of whom wanted to marry Agnes themselves, disown him; London clubland turns its back on him. So His Lordship does a bunk to Venice where he holes up in ancient palazzo with the Countess and her brutish brother. He falls ill and dies. Everybody blames the countess.


Meanwhile Agnes's former servant, whose husband just happens to have been the Montbarrys' courier in Venice, also disappears. A thousand pounds compensation from the late lordship arrives in the post. One of Montbarry's younger brothers, a minor son in search of a fortune, joins a partnership which buys the Venetian palazzo and turns it into an upmarket hotel. The son of the new Lord Montbarry marries his sweetheart. Where better for a honeymoon than Venice? Heck, why doesn't the whole family pitch up there? Agnes, obviously, is more or less family. Of course she should go with them.


Just one problem. The room in which the original Lord Montbarry died seems to be haunted. Will Agnes unravel the mystery of the missing courier?


Its a short novel but one in which Collins rolls out his full repertoire of literary tricks and traits. As in The Woman in White we have an occult mystery with elements of the detective story, a genre Collins more or less invented in The Moonstone. The narrative unfolds in a variety of voices and forms: letters, first and third person narration and - my absolute favourite - the technicalities of the mystery are revealed in a scenario for a play manically penned by the deranged and dying Countess.


Great fun.

Casanova's Homecoming - Arthur Schnitzler

Set, naturally enough, in Italy in the 18th century, this novella is a variant on Schnitzler's usual microscopic analysis of fin de siecle Viennese society.  The theme, however, is his usual - the self-indulgence of sex.

The aged roue is marooned in Mantua, desperate to be allowed to return to his home city after 25 years.  He meets, by chance, Olivo, a local landowner who, fifteen years earlier, Casanova loaned money to in order to marry.  Being Casanova, his motives were not disinterested.  He had already slept with the bride's mother and now slept with Olivo's intended, Amalia, before agreeing to the loan.  Olivo, however, knows nothing of this.  He is delighted to see Casanova, invites him to his country house and insists of repaying the loan.  Amalia is equally pleased to see Casanova.  He even convinces himself that she is eager to revisit their earlier tryst.  But his true target is Olivo's neice and ward Marcolina, a mathematics prodigy a third of Casanova's age.  He determines to have her at any price.  After all, he reasons, she is not a virgin.  He has seen the dashing Lieutenant Lorenzi leaving via her window at dawn.

Schnitzler doesn't moralise.  He wants us to form our own judgements.  It seems to me that while Casanova considers himself the great lover he always in fact contrives to pay for sex like some hideous eighteenth century kerb-crawler.  He is a predator, devoid of conscience.  He is vile, and he returns to Venice to become a paid informer for the Senate, a vile profession.  I was startled, initially, that there is no comeback for his theft of Marcolina's favours.  I had assumed that the tables would be turned and he would himself have been decieved by Amalia or one of the other women he now disdains.  But there wasn't, and that's the point.  The likes of Casanova always get away with their crimes.  The only price he has to pay is that he has to live with himself.  Only in his dreams does his essential humanity surface in horror and disgust, which it does in the sex-sated dream he has immediately after having his way with Marcolina.  You know Schnitzler has a point to make when his paragraph stretches over pages.

Venice, Pure City - Peter Ackroyd

I wish Ackroyd would get back to writing novels instead of these endless tie-ins for eye-candy TV series.  I was happy enough with his 'biographies' of London and the River Thames, but this - commissioned for Sky Arts - is 380 pages of puff.  He hasn't called it a biography because that infers life, and there is none of that here.  Nor is it a study, because it would have to be battened down with more fact than is apparent here.  I suppose it could be called a reverie, or a reflection upon themes Venetian - music, painting, empire-building etc. - but that would be generous.  It's beautifully written, of course, which only serves to remind us of the waste of talent involved in this gratuitous guff.

Blood from a Stone - Donna Leon

Another Venetian mystery for Commissario Brunetti and Signorina Elettra to solve, this one from 2005.  Vu cumpra have become an accepted part of the scene - immigrants from Senegal, mainly, mostly illegal, flogging counterfeit Prada to the foreign tourists.  But one evening two men seem to take marked exception to one of the illicit traders.  In fact, they shoot him dead in front of a group of elderly American doctors.  It's a professional hit, silencers and all.  An awful lot of effort and expense, surely, for an illegal?

The clue is in the title, a bit too obvious for my liking.  But I love Leon's characters and style, and I especially like the way she is not so mechanical as to wrap up every loose end.  Indeed, in this one nothing is really wrapped up.  We discover the motive - in Leon's expert hands, a revelation every bit as shocking as the deus ex machina of an Agatha Christie - but are left no wiser as to who the man with the hairy hands was or even the victim.

A Question of Belief - Donna Leon

A Question of Belief is the 19th Commissario Brunetti novel but the first to swim into my ken.  It is very different to much contemporary Eurocrime - there is nothing noir about it, nor is it particularly a police procedural.  It certainly isn't a thriller - we're virtually a third of the way through before anybody dies.  Yet it is compelling, the compulsion to continue arising from the recognition that you are in the presence of extremely developed characters created by a writer utterly immersed in her world.

In some senses it is old fashioned, certainly more Wallander than Harry Hole.  Venice is baking in the summer heat.  Everybody at the Questura is either on holiday already or imminently about to go on holiday.  Ispettore Vianello is worried about his aunt who has fallen under the thrall of a dodgy fortune-teller.  Toni Brusca from the Commune has uncovered worrying procedural errors at the Tribunale de Vezetia.  Cases are being ludicrously and unnecessarily delayed.  One name keeps appearing on the court documents, the usher Araldo Fortuna, a career civil servant well on his way to retirement who leaves quietly at home with his mother.  Then Fortuna is found dead, his head bashed in and semen in his rectum.  Holidays abandoned, Brunetti, Vianello and the indispensable Signorina Elettra investigate.

The plotting is so defly done it pretty much constitutes slieght of hand.  There is never a hint of the manipulation you so often get with traditional detective fiction.

I shall certainly be investigating others in the series.