Death in a Strange Country

"These are probably the most read books set in Venice. She’s written about 25 of them. They’re all exactly the same. It’s always terribly hot or terribly cold. They revolve entirely around Brunetti, our hero, going back for lunch with his wife, with whom he is very much in love, and having a quick brandy while she does the washing up, and then stomping off back to the Prefettura to do some essential police business. I think it’s really easy to go to Venice and not believe anything’s happening there. I think what’s exciting about those books is that they give you a very believable, compelling idea of something that is happening. Italians love uniforms and there are a lot of policemen and different types of police launches in Venice. She brings to life the idea of civil Venice, and to a degree also of a darkness and a world of crime, drugs, prostitution, human trafficking and all sorts of the world’s ills which don’t exclude Venice. Brunetti is a most sympathetic hero who one can only identify with, with his children and his wife who is an academic, a Jane Austen scholar or something highly convincing like that. The children are busy writing their homework, while he’s sorting out gory crimes. There’s also the most marvelous lady, a Miss Moneypenny figure who is a constant through the books, who’s always tutting and letting him in to go and see his superiors. There’s not an overarching dramatic narrative as exciting as the Cruz Smith book, but these books do immerse you in Venice. She’s American, but her complete fluency in the ways of Venice allows us to dive in with her. In coming up with these books, I was trying to provide a series of overlays, each one of which explains Venice a bit more. It’s a city that’s got a very good back catalogue of books that you can layer on top of it, all adding another bit, and I’ve tried to do that with all the books I’ve chosen. It’s the idea that you’re enriching the place. I didn’t choose Death in Venice because it’s too jolly obvious, but there are all sorts of miserable books out there. There’s a big trope of Venice as depressing and black and gloomy. I’ve been every week of the year and I just can’t find it. I’m well aware that people do. There’s definitely a whole world of Venetian gloom, but it seems absolutely joyous to me. I’ve been sad there, but in quite a nice, picturesque way. Another very good book I read was about two men who want to be members of the Venetian aristocracy, Venice’s Intimate Empire by Erin Maglaque . There was a book called the Libro D’Oro, which listed the nobility. After the serrata in 1297, no one could rise to join Venice’s Grand Council anymore. One of these men is the illegitimate son of a noble family, whose family are trying to get him legitimacy so he’s on the list. The other is a tradesman’s son, who is almost rich enough to get onto the list. One ends up being the governor of Candia, which is Crete, and the other is the governor of another town on the mainland, in Istria. The tradesman marries a local princess, and consequently does get elevated. The other one marries a servant girl who he loves, which makes it even harder for him. It’s the idea of the Venetian Republic as a complicated world. We don’t get it now because we’ve had universal suffrage for so long, but people longed to be an elector. In Venice, if you weren’t on that list, you didn’t have a vote as to who would be Doge and, as such, preferment was unlikely to come your way. No, there are lots of more general ones. John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice , which is more than 700 pages long, is very, very good. It’s probably the most thorough of all the histories. It touches on that period, and some of the issues around social mobility and the concentration of power and, also, the feeling of an empire. Now we just see Venice as a beautiful town. We don’t see it as an empire anymore because it ain’t, but it was one."