Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
The coast of Tuscany in winter as depicted by these skilled authors is a far cry from its louche high season. Now, hidden in the pines we find a gated community of wealthy residents and occasional vacationers preparing for the Christmas festivities. In keeping with an ambience of discreet sophistication everything starts slow, mannered, courteous. The retired musician frets over his proposed performance of Bach; a small boy is lost, and found unharmed; a Minister arrives to find rats in his villa, owls in the roof. But help is at hand.
The small community is serviced by a sizeable village and a host of servants, handymen and police; the cast is huge and Italian and a cast list is welcome. It includes the animals, from police dogs and a quartet of Gordon setters to those owls and rats and a porcupine, all portrayed without a whiff of sentiment.
Witty and erudite rather than funny this is a deeply perceptive novel, epitomized by Monforti, a recovering depressive whose jumbled brain slowly clicks into place as he observes the lives of his neighbours and the bumbling but well-meaning police, while all the time he is cheered and sustained by Natalia, the gorgeous single mother with whom he is hopelessly in love.
What starts as a comedy of manners is slowly stripped of its protective skins to become a novel of obsession. Monforti’s counterpart is Ugo, a vagabond philosopher in thrall to others of his kind in Ancient Greece; conversely an elderly lady is ruled by the Tarot cards (but her readings queried by her earthy Filipino maid). True, some foibles are merely subjects for derisive gossip, like the MP being convinced that it’s his Parliamentary rival who is responsible for the infestation of rats in his villa, or the gardener fuming with rage at the plumber who is having an affair with his wife. Never forgetting the two celebrated comedians who can find nothing funny. But to the victims nothing is funny. Christmas looms and nerves stretch.
This is a hotchpotch of ostensibly innocuous situations, of smouldering embers; not dramas as yet but needing a twitch, an instance: anything to make a connection. It comes in the form of a telescope: a Christmas gift to Natalia’s precocious son, but even more significant was a moment that preceded it when a porcupine crossed the road just as the Count was sneaking past the gate with a ravishing model to spend the night in his wife’s empty villa.
There is a storm; three people disappear, one comes back with the tide, bludgeoned by rocks or human hands or both. All the dogs come into play as trackers: the four Gordon setters, the police dogs. Monforti is a suspect. Hauled in for questioning he expounds the denouement with elegance and no hint of contrivance. The eponymous enigma was a puzzle which he likens to a gift from Natalia: a large jigsaw without the picture, and he has solved it according to the dictates of his scrambled brain, unscrambling and reassembling himself in the process.
This is an enchanting novel: a collaboration enhanced by the empathy and expertise of its translator, Geoffrey Dowling.
Editor’s Note: "Fruttero Lucentini" are Carlo Fruttero (1926-2012) and Franco Lucentini (1920-2002) both legendary European authors, known as pioneers of the modern crime genre
