"Midnight in Venice" by Meadow Taylor

This is a book that you tell yourself you should stop reading. It’s a mystery. It’s romantic suspense. It’s about Venice. And a billionaire who's a brilliant concert pianist, and a race car driver and a cop. It stretches credulity, and it keeps stretching credulity.  

And you keep reading because you can’t put it down.

 

Midnight in Venice by Meadow Taylor tells the story of Olivia Moretti, a Canadian who’s moving to Venice for several months to work for a prestigious art gallery co-owned by her cousin. She runs afoul a aa police detective Alexandro Rossi, at the airport. (The prequal short story, Christmas in Venice, was reviewed here last week. It’s the first chapter of the full novel.)

 

Rossi’s wife disappeared four years before, and she’s presumed dead. Her disappearance is the primary reason Rossi joined the police force; he was previously a concert pianist and a race car driver, and he’s fabulously wealthy. (You see the credulity begin to strain here – a billionaire cop who lives like a monk in a working-class neighborhood but happens to have an enormous home in nearby Padua.

 

Carnival time is approaching, and it’s not unusual for people to begin wearing costumes. Like the surprisingly common one of the “plague doctor,” invented to “scare away” the bubonic plague when it ravaged Venice centuries before. What is unusual is for someone dressed as the plague doctor to be following Olivia around Venice. 

 

Unexpectedly, Olivia is told take a suitcase full of Murano glass to New York. The suitcase contains the glass; it also contains several bags of heroin. And detective Rossi has to wonder if the woman he’s fallen in love with is part of a drug ring. And the implications are his wife may have been involved as well. 

 

And then the story gets really crazy. It doesn’t matter, because, by this time, you have to find out what’s happening. You don’t care that the story has passed the point of believability. And just when you think you have it all figured out – you don’t.

 

Meadow Taylor is the pen name of two (unnamed) Ontario authors of historical fiction. In addition to Midnight in Venice, Taylor has also published the novels The Billionaire’s Secrets and Falling for Rain and the short story Christmas in Bruges. 

 

Related:

 

Christmas in Venice by Meadow Taylor.

 

Top photo: The plague doctor at the Venice carnival by Conor Rabbett via Unsplash. Used with permission.

John Berendt’s “The City of Falling Angels”

John Berendt, author of the bestselling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (216 weeks on the New York Times Bestsellers List), arrived in Venice in the winter of 1996, only a couple of weeks after a fire had destroyed the La Fenice opera house. The building had previously burned twice, in 1774 and 1836, and had been rebuilt both times.

What Berendt recognized was the fire was a story, an intriguing story, and it just might be the prism through which to tell the larger story of Venice. And so he stayed on, rented a room, and began to talk with people.

The City of Falling Angels was first published in 2005, the year after the rebuilt opera house was opened. And the story Berendt tells, a story of Venice, is a fascinating one.

The opera house fire becomes a framework to write the story of Venice – its history, its politics, its maze of bureaucratic rules, its first families (how many doges do you have in your family line?), the expats who live and have lived there (especially Americans), the rivalries of the charitable organizations set up to save and restore city buildings, artwork, and icons. But it’s not only a story of rich people; Venice is also the story of artists and bakers, gondola drivers and electricians, and the crazy time that is Carnival.

City authorities initially investigated the fire as one of negligence, and there was plenty of ongoing negligence to go around before the fire – cans of solvents left open, blow torches left burning, improper ventilation. And then, in the way that really good stories do, the investigations focuses on arson.

John Berendt

With the story of the La Fenice fire comes the stories of a family of glassblowers, what happened to the papers of poet Ezra Pound, a wealthy American family that has lived in self-enforced exile since the late 19^th century, and the battle of Save Venice vs. Venetian Heritage (the rich can be just as petty as the rest us, and perhaps more so). It’s an entertaining mix of fact and myth, perception and reality.

Berendt, a native of New York State, received his B.A. degree in English from Harvard University. He’s worked in publishing, writing for television talk show hosts (David Frost and Dick Cavett), and worked at New York Magazine and Esquire. His story of murder in Savannah, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, was virtually an overnight sensation when it was published in 1994.

Top photograph: La Fenice Opera House in Venice, after its restoration from the fire. Image via Wikipedia.

Riccardo Bruni’s “The Lion and the Rose”

It is Venice, 1502. Matthias Munster, a monk in trouble with his order over his teaching is asked to return to Venice to help the Doge solve a horrific series of crimes: the bodies of three men have been found floating in the Grand Canal. They endured horrible torture before they were killed. Only one can be identified – a printer of books.

Matthias wants to return to his native Germany, to teach in a new school being established in Wittenberg. The winds of reform are blowing through his soul, and one of the reasons is the Venetian woman he’s in love with. He agrees to investigate the murders for the Doge, only to find himself increasingly sucked into power politics involving the Venetian merchant nobility, the church, and Pope Alexander VI, formerly known as Rodrigo Borgia, who is maneuvering to bring Venice under his control.

At the heart of Riccardo Bruni’s The Lion and the Rose (translated by Aaron Maines) is the true story the Donation of Constantine, by which the Emperor Constantine supposedly transferred authoring over Rome and the Western Roman Empire to the pope. It was by this document that the popes claimed political authority over much of Western Europe. A 15^th century monk, Lorenzo Valla, undertook textual analysis of the document and proved that it was a forgery. He assembled his proof in a manuscript.

In Bruni’s novel, it is this manuscript that has made its way to Venice to be secretly printed. And it is this manuscript that a group of Venetian nobles and the pope will stop at nothing to find and destroy. And someone has employed that the people of Venice consider can only be a demon to murder printers and others to find Valla’s manuscript.

The Lion and the Rose is a well researched tale, with a pace filled with increasing tension. Side stories involving the woman Matthias loves, the nephew of one of the murdered printers who’s in love with a young novitiate nun, and a young Jewish man who hates the nephew are skillfully woven into the larger story.

Riccardo Bruni

Venice itself becomes almost a character in the story as the characters move across its narrow streets, canals, alleyways, palaces, inns, and warehouses. Gondolas, familiar today as boat rides for tourists, were used in the early 16th century as as transportation, movement of cargo like trade imports, and, in this story, scenes for clandestine meetings and the movement of terrified victims.

Bruni is a journalist and writer for webzines, magazines, press agencies, and the author of five novels. This story is the first to be translated into English (and also German).

The Lion and the Rose is an intriguing story, combining both a fictional story with actual events. (And in reality, Valla’s manuscript does eventually get published – in 1517, the same year Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the door of the cathedral at Wittenberg.) 

Photograph of the Ponte Di Rialto in Venice by Eliska Nikodemova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.