Matteo
Bortolotti: Much love Europe
- n. 1
Sophie
Colpaert, Mma Ramotswe, African detective
Véronique
Desnain, Contemporary British Women Crime Writers:
Breaking the Mould?
Cormac
Millar,
Women in Crime Fiction: Temptress, Victim, Saviour and Reward
Claudia
Salvatori: The doctor, the young lady, and the
crime fiction author
Giovanni
Zucca: Lia Volpatti -
Il segreto di Agatha (Agatha's secret)
Much
love Europe - n. 1
Matteo Bortolotti
Translation : Cristina
Johnston
Perhaps in the throes of the deliriousness brought on by some homeopathic
medicine or other, Bogey once said something along the lines
of: ‘You should never contradict a woman. All you need to do is wait:
she'll contradict herself.' But Humphrey was certainly not feminism's
global figurehead.
I must admit that starting
an article in this way risks ensuring that the female audience will
stop reading before they get beyond the first four lines, but those
who know me will know that I often start from something distant, that
I begin with the other in order to
arrive here, in my neck of the woods. You will also learn
to know me, if you wish.
Guys and girls, trust me for another two lines
and I will show you that Bogey said something true. Something most
beautiful.
It is said that a woman is an expanding
Universe. Even more than that, a powerful and changing magma, capable
of extreme rationality, of great determination, of sudden fragility
and of love, a love that man often does not know… Banalities, we
might say…
And yet.
The question of female love
is one that many have investigated and I do not wish to dwell on it
here, what interests me instead is the contradiction.
The contradiction – when
it is deliberate, and don't try to tell me that it is not deliberate
most of the time – is one of the fundamental
bases of the interrogation, analysis and understanding of Self.
Contradictions
are at the heart of every good story. Particularly detective stories.
Women
and detective fiction, in that case, could not make better bedfellows.
Let us take two examples – even if they might be termed predictable – and
then we will cite a number of Italian women on whom I invite you to
cast your gaze (in an academic sense, of course. This is an invitation
to read, I am certainly not like Bogey…).
Thirty years ago, on January
12 th 1976, one of the greatest researchers working in the field of
the whodunnit closed her eyes for the last time: Agatha Christie was
facing ‘the big sleep.' Who said ‘so
what'? Agatha Christie's problem lies in the way she is depicted,
above and beyond her vast bibliography which can precisely be viewed
more as an indication of the role of researcher she played, rather
than a sign of her marketability.
Yes, you read correctly, a researcher.
In the case of old aunt Agatha, detective fiction, the mystery story,
was a true quest within a defined style, a literary and narrative aesthetic
that, on the surface, seem repetitive and that found, in Christie's
work, a continual freshness. It's all a matter of personal taste, and
as a noiriste I
won't enter into the merits of Raymond Chandler's observation that
crime should return to the streets and abandon the houses of the rich.
This is not the core of our discussion. It's not the Cluedo factor.
I am talking about a person who worked with stories. The incontrovertible
truth is that old aunt Agatha took hold of the cage – man's eternal
problem, burden and delight for priests and philosophers – and explored
every one of its locks, bars, floors. Some of auntie's pages are also
beautiful pages of literature. Beautiful words, great architecture.
Could we ask for anything more? Oh yes, of course. The contradiction…
The contradiction lies in the very field
explored by the aunt. The fact that she constructed an enigmatic,
surreal universe, following Positivist trends and developing it with
great swathes – in my humble
opinion – of satire of society. Be careful, though, satire is not the
same as parody, which is how some film adaptations of her books have
rendered it. Furthermore, there is also a truly scientific application
of the formal exposition.
Staying with the theme of contradictions,
who has shown us better than Patricia Highsmith the other side of the
question? Intense psychological crime fiction. Who is more contradictory
than Mr Ripley, exploiting this feminine thrust to demonstrate that
there lies, in every one of us, male or female, a raging battle that
never seems to reach an end. The great Mother figure, the Goddess Kali,
at once nurse and ferocious assassin.
In Italy we have excellent examples
of both of these strands. Claudia Salvatori, a great author of mysteries,
as well as the excellent Alda Teodorani. We have the questions of
the gentle and difficult protagonist of Grazia Verasani's novels
and then we have the queen of Italian historical crime fiction – and
I don't say that only because she is a friend of mine or because
I have asked her four simple questions for you… As
a noiriste I often talk with people who write about investigative
thrillers and, for me, she is the queen.
Danila Comastri Montanari,
born in 1948, has been writing about fiction since 1990, when her extremely
enjoyable first novel MORS TUA was
published, with its investigator ante litteram (I'm using too much
Latin in this sentence, amn't I?), Publio Aurelio Stazio.
Since I have
been busy, these past few days, with things to do with tv and with
my new novel, I got in touch with her via email…
Four simple questions to… DCM
Matteo
Bortolotti: Danila, what is your relationship with
mysteries? When and why did you chose to write mystery romans à clef?
Danila
Comastri Montanari: I love mysteries precisely because I don't believe in mysteries: everything
that seems enigmatic is just waiting for a rational explanation. Mystery
fiction, unlike other genres, tries to provide one.
M.B.: You have spent a lot of time teaching in schools: how much did you
learn there compared to what you have written?
D.C.M.: I tend to learn irrelevant things and those things that are heavy
with meaning remain beyond me.
M.B.: I see that we are coming back to the
question of contradictions… A
predictible question: from the first century AD – the period in which
you have set the adventures of your protagonist Publio Aurelio Stazio – in
your opinion, how much have we changed? Is it true that, no matter
how hard an author tries, s/he always ends up writing about their own
times?
D.C.M.: Of course an author always writes about his/her own times! And besides,
if I didn't combine continual allusions to the present with Latin crimes
in my books, I'd have much less fun.
M.B.: And
what about our times? What do you make of the New Empire, is it very
different from 2000 years ago? I have the impression that the leaders
were very different to George Walker Bush…
D.C.M.: The Romans availed themselves of a series
of pretexts in order to wage war on peoples they had chosen to bring
under their yoke, but since they weren't lacking in experience, they
invented excuses that were more plausible than those used by Bush.
In any case, unlike the Americans, they won their wars…
M.B.: Women and crime fiction, as I told you,
I'd like to start an article by confronting the notion of the contradiction,
citing a few interesting examples… How many female writers do you
know in the genre and how many do you take pleasure in reading?
D.C.M.: Truth
be told, whether the author is male or female, old or young, beautiful
or ugly, black or white, a believer or an atheist, gay or straight,
really doesn't interest me in the slightest, a priori: I wait to discover
the viewpoint, a posteriori, in the pages of their novels.
Christie
is a great, but she is part of history. I read primarily historical
crime fiction (Anne Perry, Ellis Peters) or detective fiction set in
the metropolises of Scandinavia, Turkey, China, Japan, India, Israel,
Africa, etc (the world does not end at our borders) but don't ask me
about the gender of the authors, because often their names are unpronouncable.
Ok,
that's enough for this time. I shall return to my tales… And remember:
don't be afraid of the dark: true shadows are always to be found where
the sun beats down.
Mma
Ramotswe, African detective
From the books by Alexander
McCall Smith
(10/18 coll. ‘Great Detectives')
Sophie Colpaert
Translation: Joanna Brown
In
1998, a new type of detective arrived on the detective novel scene,
from the pen of Scottish writer Alexander McCall Smith: Mma Ramotswe,
founder of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, based in Gaborone,
the capital of Botswana.
Alexander McCall Smith has a strong attachment
to Botswana. The smells, sounds and colours of Africa have permeated
the memory of this man born in Zimbabwe in 1948. Equally he remembers
the bloody independence movements… the sombre face of Africa , the
inadequacies of the state, the corruption, civil war, and the displaced,
starving, badly treated peoples. In short, everything that regularly
makes the front pages of our newspapers Alexander McCall Smith knows
all too well. He still remembers his journeys across the Transvaal
in the 1980s, when it was not a good idea to go deep into that South
African province. From the other side of the border, Botswana seemed
to be an ideal place: a democratic country since its independence
in 1966, where people take respect for the law and the constitution
seriously. A country spared from civil war and famine. This is the
Africa that Alexander McCall Smith has chosen to show. An Africa
concerned about its future, as luminous as Botswana 's sky and as
generous as Mma Ramotswe.
Precious Ramotswe is thirty-four when
she loses her beloved father and inherits a herd of cattle. A traditionally
built African woman, as the author himself describes her, Mma Ramotswe
has a failed marriage with a violent trumpet player behind her, and
had a daughter who died all too early. Experiences that she can draw
upon to understand the pain many women go through, and maybe help
them in their everyday lives…
The sale of her father's herd provides
her with the means to realise her dream of opening a private detective
agency and ‘help her brothers
and sisters to solve mysteries in their lives'*.
Mma Ramotswe finds a local office at the foot of Mount Kgale and employs
an indispensable secretary, Mma Makutsi. They then await their first
client, sipping bush tea. The hours pass and the miracle actually happens:
Mma Malatsi crosses the threshold and confides in Mma Ramotswe that
she is worried about her husband's disappearance. The man was part
of a religious group, and disappeared in the river while the reverend
was preparing to baptise him along with five others, who saw nothing.
A nocturnal expedition allows Mma Ramotswe to resolve the matter (a
crocodile is responsible), and she is able to bring her client material
proof of the death of her husband, so that she can say goodbye properly.
Bolstered by this first success, the detective invests in a manual: ‘The
Principles of Private Detection' by Clovis Andersen, which she can
use to tackle seriously the cases that follow.
The majority of Mma Ramotswe's clientele are women, and one client
follows another, and each investigation is an excuse to tell a slice
of African life. Mma Pekwane, ashamed of seeing her husband driving
a stolen Mercedes, wants the car to be returned discreetly to its owner.
Happy Bapetsi is growing tired of looking after an increasingly demanding
free-loader, claiming to be her father. Only, before sending him packing,
she wants to be sure that he really is an impostor. Mma Ramotswe finds
a way to make this man admit that he is shamelessly exploiting the
old Botswanian moral code that states that one should look after one's
family no matter what.
The question of the status of women is
very much highlighted in all the books through the character Mma
Makutsi, the secretary. She graduated from Botswanian Secretarial
College as its best student, scoring an historic 97/100. This young
woman, with her too dark complexion and large glasses that swallow
half her face, does not match the current notion of a perfect example
of beauty seemingly preferred by candidates who are less brilliant,
but so much prettier to look at…The secretary
turned assistant detective also has to deal with many a disappointment
before she meets her future husband, a furniture salesman from Gaborone
who is pathologically shy.
The apprentices who work for J.L.B. Matekoni,
garage owner and husband of Mma Ramotswe, show how the Botswanian
mentality has developed, influenced by the sort of American culture
that is promoted by the cinema and television series. Mma Ramotswe
strongly disapproves of this change of course. She continues to be
filled with that African tradition that means that one systematically
shares one's fortune with those less lucky. Employing a small team
of staff (a cleaning woman, a gardener…)
as soon as one has the means is a way of fulfilling this moral obligation,
as is helping one's family out financially when they need it.
The devastation caused by AIDS is also
not forgotten, but mentioned between the lines. Mma Makutsi welcomes
her brother into her home and cares for him until he dies; there
is a worker who defrauds his medical insurance company in order to
make ends meet because he has his family to look after – parents, sisters and a brother close to dying of ‘the
disease of which everyone is dying at the moment'. The children of
decimated families swell the ranks of the orphan farm, an establishment
run by Mma Potokwan, an energetic woman of traditional build, a great
friend of Mma Ramotswe. When she learns of the engagement of Mma Ramotswe
and J.L.B.Matekoni, she convinces the garage owner to foster two children
who will come to brighten up the couple's home: a little girl in a
wheelchair and her younger brother. These two children are young Basarwas,
children of those tribes that live in the Kalahari desert , thereby
raising the delicate issue of this minority group. So many things separate
the desert tribes, once reduced to slavery, from the Botswanians: a
very different way of life, a language that is incomprehensible to
the Botswanians, a different morphology… and prejudice dies hard everywhere.
Mma Potokwane knows that she can convince J.L.B. Matekoni to foster
these two children, simply by telling him their story. Then all that
remains is for the garage owner to explain to his fiancée how
he has fostered two children for them both without discussing it with
her! At first a little angry at not being consulted, Mma Ramotswe soon
accepts the gift with an open heart, as evidence of the enormous generosity
of the man that she is preparing to marry. Thus she is director of
the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, and also a wife, and mother of
a family, the height of happiness and success, in Botswana and everywhere
else really!
Some have criticised this series, reproaching
it for being too naïve
about Africa 's great problems. The author has chosen to present an
Africa that is full of hope. Mma Ramotswe's small investigations are
never lacking suspense, and some scenes are irresistibly funny. If
the overall tone sometimes seems a little naive, it doesn't stop the
stories sticking in your head when you've put the
book down, and there they take on all their social dimensions.
Besides a study of the books, this article was largely informed by
an interview with Alexander McCall Smith available at www.commonwealth.org (S.Colpaert).
* Alexander
McCall Smith, Mma
Ramotswe Detective (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency,
1998).
Women
in Crime Fiction:
Temptress,
Victim, Saviour and Reward
Cormac Millar
Cormac Millar lives in Dublin where,
as Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, he teaches Italian at Trinity
College. A translator and academic author, his latest crime novel
is The Grounds (Penguin
Ireland, 2006). See www.cormacmillar.com.
Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia explained that the human soul
is vegetable, animal and rational. The vegetable soul looks for safety
and survival. The animal soul possesses motion, notably towards what
attracts it, leading to love. The rational soul seeks to do what is
right. Good crime fiction addresses our three-part soul in all its
dimensions, starting from the bottom up with heroic tales of safety
defended. The answer to the survival question links naturally to the
erotic, with love and death sometimes intertwined in the iconic figure
of a woman, simultaneously good and bad, bringer of life and death.
Not that it's
always so dramatic. Crime writing presents a great diversity of female
characters, cleverly orchestrated across a scale of “womanly” values.
Even the tedious end of the scale has its uses, anchoring the story
in everyday reality. Simenon's Madame Maigret is that most delightful
of oxymorons, a respectable married woman. As the other half of her
husband's normal domestic life, she represents degree zero of femininity,
the starting-point of all mystery.
Mysteries are much concerned with guilt, so
innocence must raise its pretty head. As a rule, if women are really
innocent, they're in danger. If not, you're in danger. Sciascia's masterly To
Each His Own presents
Luisa Roscio, the mother-temptress who leads the nerdish detective
to his doom. By the time you reach the end of the book, her story is
so much better than his that you accept that the silly little man had
to die. Luisa has many less subtle sisters in the temptation business.
They derive some satisfaction from their sins.
Victim and vamp are tangled with figures
of woman as saviour or reward, often within the same character. In
Hugo Hamilton's Headbanger (currently
being hailed as a masterpiece by the French), drug-addicted Naomi performs
vulgar exotic dance routines to accompany ritual murders, and leads
a married cop to stray from the path of virtue. She hovers between
the roles of vamp and victim, but then, in a thrilling finale, tries
to save the cop's life.
“The women I clubbed with sex! / I broke them
up like meringues,” Philip
Larkin's pathetic alter ego reminisces in “A Study of Reading Habits”.
Woman in the crime novel can be a consumable reward, not just for the
reader but for the discerning hero: think of Pepé Carvalho's
gourmet approach to Chilean Gladys in Vázquez Montalbán's
Murder on the Central Committee.
Salvation is more fundamental than reward.
The right superheroine can accomplish everything simultaneously.
Take Inspector Grazia Negro, a Bolognese cop in Carlo Lucarelli's
Almost Blue. Not only
does she track down the mad serial killer just before he does away
with the charming blind boy, but she tactfully waits until he has murdered
the blind boy's somewhat overprotective mother, and then proceeds to
initiate the boy into the wonders of adult sex. All of this while coping
with severe menstrual cramps.
My own first novel, An Irish
Solution,
featured a middle-aged man in thrall to his conventional wife. He is
awoken to the voice of conscience by an ancient nun and a troubled
schoolgirl who try to live the life of the rational soul: to do what
is right. This turns out to be a dangerous option.
No rule holds good in every circumstance. Women
are not confined by expectations.
Suggested hyperlinks from book titles:
To
Each His Own
Headbanger
Murder
on the Central Committee
Almost
Blue
An
Irish Solution
The
doctor, the young lady,
and the crime fiction author
Claudia Salvatori
Translation: Cristina Johnston
Claudia
Salvatori is a writer of comic strips and for films. Her stories
have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. She has published Più tardi
da Amelia (which won the
Tedeschi prize in 1985), Columbus Day, Mistero a Castel
Rundegg, and Schiavo e padrona (published by Marco
Tropea Editore and adapted as a film starring Rocco Siffredi Amorestremo).
Her latest works are: Ildegarda (published by Mondadori), Il
sorriso di Anthony Perkins and La donna senza testa (published
by Alacrán). Her Nazi-thriller Nessuno piange per il diavolo has
just been released (published by Hobby & Work). She is currently
series editor of Codice giallo, published by the Genoa based
firm De Ferrari.
A dear friend of mine, a surgeon on an
emergency ward, leaving the operating theatre exhausted after a gruelling
shift, heard another woman asking, ‘Excuse me, Miss, where can I
find a doctor?' My friend, who had wanted to save human lives, would
gladly have stuck her scalpel into the woman's heart. Here is a typical
example of a cultural short circuit. Years of study, specialisation,
and training, and even the image of female doctors in soap operas,
have not changed the ontological substance of young ladies: doctors
are, and will remain, different.
Writing is a different type of professional activity, but the same
cultural short circuit is in operation, further reinforced by a quicksand
of ambiguities, lies, and false myths. Italy, a country of doctors
(I know little of France, Germany or other European countries), arriving
in the operating theatre for an emergency procedure, will resign itself
to the female doctor: the same cannot be said, however, of situations
where there is no risk of death: Italy allows its stomach to be opened
but not its imagination, it does not allow its dreams to be operated
on by the young lady writer.
We are living the great fraud of equal opportunities: present on maps
and definitely also in real life (we don't doubt it). But that is precisely
the point, in real life. In unreal life, the difference remains
between doctors and young ladies.
The young lady writer is burdened with
the weight of her cultural tradition, in which the masculine represents
the human while the feminine represents only the feminine, or rather
the complementary – the opposite
of human. How should she encourage her readers to identify with her
work? If she chooses a male protagonist, she will perhaps lose a part
of herself, but if she proposes a female protagonist, she will lose
the others, or will win readers that she did not desire. And if she
defiles the masculine with corrosive criticism? If she attempts to
construct a non-feminine female, will she be understood? Every day,
every minute of her life, she must resolve enigmas of such complexity.
And as if the internal problems were not enough, there are also external
ones: namely the reception of the work. The book is a meeting between
one's own little theatre of fantasies and those of the (male or female)
reader.
The imagination, which is all around us and permeates every recess
of that which escapes the real world, has zones of extraordinary pace,
veritable volcanic eruptions; and zones of stagnation in which everything
is immobile and rotting. The white heat of the young lady writer's
fantasy often dies out, and disperses, in these slow trickles of putrid
water: the passive resistence, habitual and reassuring, of a collective
imagination which addresses itself only to the historical prestige
of the doctor.
The current crime fiction boom is, in my opinion, a living paradox
that propagates the cultural short circuit ever more quickly. Literary
genres, once declassed, were the domain of the manual work of intellect
and creativity. The subordinate female worker, the female author of
crime fiction, was thus a possibility (more in the Anglo-Saxon world
than in Italy ); furthermore, even men who were dedicated to crime
fiction were young ladies. Now that literary genres are becoming one
literature, writers who would once have followed another path become
involved, and as a consequence the age-old hierarchy is constructed:
here are the new doctors of crime fiction, followed by a swarm of recently
qualified doctors, students, nurses, and nuns.
For the confused and astounded young lady who had, in the meantime,
become an author of crime fiction, there aredebates, at literary festivals,
on women's writing, on women's crime fiction, on women's anything and
everything. The young lady participates in public debates with other
women, almost never with men: as though the two belonged to two different
peoples, separated by habits, customs, and religions. Nobody seems
to realise that the cultural short circuit would be tamed if we threw
open the doors of perception and if doctors began to identify with
young ladies. At least in the world of the imagination, where ontological
barriers can be broken down without causing material damage.
And yet, if the young lady writer is held at bay, looked on with suspicion,
devalued or even removed, this means it is deep within us, in the most
secret part of our doctor's soul, and therefore absolutely necessary,
indispensable. This is what makes me grit my teeth and keep on going,
amid personal trials and poor sales, amid calm rages and calls for
literary sterilization never enacted.
Diseased organs need the young lady's scalpel.
Lia
Volpatti - Il segreto di Agatha*
Giovanni
Zucca
Translation: Karen Vincent-Jones
An elegant mansion in the English countryside,
in Torquay, Devonshire (first clue). Two women, an Italian journalist
and an English writer. The first woman, an expert in crime fiction,
has come here to interview the second, known as ‘the Queen of Crime'
(second clue). But the journalist is not thinking of the interview
alone; for a long time now, ever since she read a classic 1930s crime
novel, The Invisible Host , she
has been troubled by doubts. This novel is very similar, too similar,
to perhaps the most famous of all the Queen of Crime's novels, …And
Then There Were None (originally Ten Little Niggers , changed
to Ten Little Indians in the USA for reasons of racial sensitivity).
It would be superfluous to point out at this stage that that the ‘Queen'
in question is none other than Agatha Christie, the best-selling crime
writer in the world, and that the truth (and danger) seeking journalist
is our very own Lia Volpatti, the author of the book under discussion.
Partly willingly, partly under pressure, the great writer talks about
herself, the beginnings of her career, the need for money that drove
her to write crime novels (she was a great admirer of Sherlock Holmes),
her unexpected success, bringing wealth and fame but also the pain of
not being able to live a normal life… Forty novels, over a hundred
short stories, plays (did I hear The Mousetrap ?), and films
based on her novels, most of which the creator of Poirot and Miss Marple
hated… Among
them, and the best of them, not only in her own estimation, was one directed
by the great René Clair in 1943, based on, wait for it, Ten
Little Indians . During the course of the long interview- interrupted
by cups of tea, tea-time, dinner, and continuing the next day- our journalist
occasionally drops hints, you might say sly hints, about this book. Finally
she comes out with the plain bald accusation, the one every author fears:
plagiarism. This accusation is painful to make given Lia's great admiration
for Agatha. But will Agatha really disclose her secret? We will only
be told on the final page...
It was years since I had taken up one
of Dame Agatha's books, although years ago I read a number of them,
only to abandon them when I chose crimes committed on the street
rather than in the vicar's drawing room (although I don't think the
dear lady bore me a grudge). I have to say that this appealing book,
this interview (followed by a detailed bibliography and filmography
compiled by Lia Volpatti's usual collaborator, Gian Franco Orsi – she
is editor in chief and he is director of Giallo Mondadori, the Mondadori
crime imprint) made me want to read something of hers again, perhaps
even Ten Little Indians , or Murder
on the Orient Express, with its star-studded cast in the movie
version. Oh, but I was forgetting: of course the interview never took
place (remember that 70s Italian radio programme Impossible Interviews ?),
but it is real in its own way and quite well documented. A light-hearted
essay in the guise of a novel: definitely a good way to commemorate
Christie on the thirtieth anniversary of her death.
* Agatha's secret
Lia Volpatti, Il segreto di Agatha. Alacran
editore, 2006, 208 pagine
