lection

ultime notizie di una fuga

22 september 2024

There's a continuum of police-inspector novels, from those that strictly adhere to police procedure to those where the protagonist is a cop but might as well be Hercule Poirot. Valerio Varesi's first Commissario Soneri novel, Ultime notizie di una fuga ("Latest reports about someone who took flight," 1998), goes about as far as a mystery writer can in the latter direction.

The "fuga" of the title involves fleeing from cops and robbers alike. Mario Rocchetta has been an accountant for a business with concerns on both sides of the law. Already a money launderer, Rocchetta has turned embezzler, and vanished – along with his wife, his two sons, and his camper van, though the last of these turns up abandoned on a street in Milan.

And then everybody forgets about Rocchetta for quite a while, till a news story breaks that somebody may or may not have seen the fugitive on a Caribbean island. Soneri is not officially assigned the cold case. He merely takes an interest in it. Aside from a few archivists and a couple of people who tap phone lines for the police, Soneri doesn't engage with a single other cop in the course of his investigation.

In fact, the investigation consists mainly of driving around and dropping in on people as one name leads to another, in classic Southern-California private-eye mode. Soneri is far more like Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer than he's like Maigret or Montalbano. His only confidant is a lawyer named Tobia. I can't understand what Tobia's relationship to the police might be, or why he spends so much time aiding Soneri's informal investigation. Tobia is simply a sidekick; he obeys literary, not official, imperatives.

Soneri and Tobia spend a lot of time eating good meals and enjoying serviceable wines. Fictional detectives can be sorted into people who linger over their food and those who choke down a burger when they begin to starve. Soneri is well over on the gourmand side of that particular scale.

The plot of Ultime notizie di una fuga is more like a local train than an express. Soneri tracks one clue to the next, without much action along the way. The clues all seem to involve accounting procedures. In the end, the solution to the "mystery" is pretty much what you would imagine it to be.

I realize this sounds like the dullest novel on earth. But oddly, it isn't. The linear plot doesn't twist and turn, but I (at least) kept reading with increasing suspense, a suspense that Varesi has Soneri himself feel as he gets closer to his goal. Soneri tracks Rocchetta from Milan to London and then Barbados. We know he's going to find him, but we are not at all certain what doom awaits. The ending doesn't surprise, but it unsettles. This is an offbeat way of structuring a crime novel, but it's effective.

Varesi, Valerio. Ultime notizie di una fuga. Faenza: Mobydick, 1998.

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