novels, ghost- and horror-stories or police serials. I have never been a lover of
gore and pure blood-spurting horror and ghost stories are unlikely to impress -
much less scare- me, as my home borders on a cemetery. Living dead and evil
ghosts; big deal. Detective- and police-stories can occasionally be fun -I like an
Agatha Christie every now and then, but therein exactly lays the problem. I like
Agatha Christie because her stories are set in the past; I am not sure whether I
would have liked her stories and plays at all had I read them at the time they
were first published. Things seemed simpler back then, and with the stories set
in a time when the story was about trying to locate the killer before the end of
the book, the stories do not pretend to be something that they are not. They
are written for the puzzling enjoyment of the reader, the stories are
straightforward and all you have to do is look out for the clues and start
guessing. Nowadays we often get psychological thrillers that demand constant
attention, with flash-backs and flash-forwards, asides and side-tracking that
does not seem to make any sense until we seem to understand what the
person in question is all about. Perhaps I am a lazy reader not willing to invest
his time into such a story, but for me personally, I prefer my dose of
(psychological) thriller to be consumed sitting in the dark of a cinema.
Thus I always steer clear of the airport bookshops with their displays full of
Follett (though I must admit I succumbed to this one), Le Carré, Koontz and all
the others, including a mysterious woman-writer named Donna Leon. I suppose
this is her pen-name, since all her mysteries are set in Venice, which has the
Lion (Leon) as its symbol, whilst Donna is plainly ‘girl’ in Italian. How I came to
read this book is another story altogether, which you can read here.
All of her novels feature Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venetian police as
the protagonist investigating the crime. The book I read turned out to be
number seven in the series. In ‘A noble radiance’ starts with a body that is dug
up in the garden of a dilapidated villa in the Veneto countryside. A signet ring
found near the body bears the crest of the Lorenzoni family; a wealthy patrician
family from nearby Venice, who where in the news several years before
because their son was abducted and never returned. Could this be the body of
their lost son? Brunetti investigates the case and probes the past in order to
find out the truth.
The abducted boy, who was an only child and heir to the family’s business,
apparently never showed too much interest in running the business, unlike his
nephew Maurizio, who actually took over after the disappearance. Does he
know more about it? What about the father and mother, the various friends and
foes he had and the mysterious doctor-visits a few weeks before his abduction?
‘A noble radiance’ is an old-fashioned mystery in the way it constructed; clues
abound, some useful, some apparently leading us to think in some direction but
really false. Leon tries to make Brunetti a straight and honest man; we get
glimpses of his own private life with his family and he seems to muse on the
rights and wrongs of the justice system in Venice. Leon only succeeds partially,
in that these side-tracks sometimes become too dominant and distract from the
mystery; if they had been less frequent or if they had been created as a more
integral part of this particular police-case, the whole would have had more
strength and punch.
Nevertheless, I was surprised by how much I liked ‘A noble radiance’, and
reading it in Venice surely added to my appreciation. It offers an interesting
denouement of the events, something which I deed not see coming at all,
though of course if I had paid better attention to the clues... In the end this
book is enjoyable for what it is: an hour passed guessing how the events might
have taken place and which identity the killer might have.
