The Girl from Venice

"Yes, it’s a thriller that’s set in the lagoon and in Venice and northern Italy, towards the end of World War Two, in 1945. It begins with the murder of a German officer and it’s about a Jewish woman who is rescued by a fisherman who hides her. It’s an extraordinary adventure story. The fisherman’s brother is a rising star of Fascist Italian cinema and is a great favorite of the local Gauleiter but also of Il Duce. So one brother is basically a partisan and the other is an apparatchik of the regime. It deals with this extraordinary moment in history. Things go badly at beginning of the war for Mussolini and eventually the king, who is sitting in the Villa Ada in Rome, says to Mussolini, who’s living in the Villa Torlonia down the road, ‘Could you come and see me this afternoon? Don’t wear a uniform.’ Mussolini’s wife asks, ‘Why aren’t you wearing a uniform darling?’ And he says it’s because his majesty said don’t wear one, which is a bit odd, but never mind. So he goes down the road. And the king says, ‘Listen, things didn’t go well for you in parliament yesterday.’ They had gone very badly. But Mussolini said (a bit like Boris), ‘We’ve got a majority. It’s alright.’ And the king said ‘No, it’s not alright. It’s no good. And this is going to play badly for us all. So I’m afraid you’re going to have to stand down now.’ And Mussolini says, ‘Okay, well, I’ll just get my driver.’ The king says, ‘No your driver is already gone. The reason I asked you to wear ordinary clothes is you’re going to be going by ambulance. And he is sent out of the back of the Villa Ada and packed off and is disappeared. Later, he gets reinstated after a couple of satisfactory German operations. The worst bits of Nazi activity in Italy are from this second manifestation of Mussolini, where he’s hardened up and is under German orders. That’s when the ghetto is emptied, that’s when in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis , instead of being told they can’t be members of the tennis club, the entire family is deported and killed. It’s also where things go drastically and appallingly wrong for Mussolini and, in due course, he is shot against a wall and hung up outside the Esso garage with his girlfriend Clara Petacci. The Girl from Venice is a brilliant read. It’s a very good story. If you were, for example, going to Venice in the summer, and you wanted to sit on the Lido for a day and read a book, I would read that. You’d look out onto the lagoon from your lovely cabana. And you’d think, ‘Bloody hell, that was what was going on here.’ It’s a novel, but it’s very well dressed. I’m not a great thriller reader, but I thought it was wonderful."