Poe’s detective stories from the 1840s introduced the world to a new genre of fiction in which a crime-solving protagonist matches wits against both the criminal underworld as well as the reader, since part of the “narrative device” from which detective fiction derives its power involves the reader’s own attempts to “read between the lines” and arrive at the solution before (or in tandem with) the detective.

A number of interesting riffs on the old theme have been developed by writers over the years, helping the genre achieve a literary quality that many consider “a cut above” mere formula. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett exploited the ambiguity of the hard-boiled gumshoe whose methods bordered on the criminal and whose final solution and close proximity to the underworld result in a world of moral uncertainty. More recently, Walter Mosley introduced the African-American detective Easy Rawlins, whose uneasy relationship to a dominant white culture in 1960s Los Angeles (before and after the Watts riots) creates a backdrop of constant tension as the character tries to balance various commitments.

As a quick glance at the Google results suggests, one of the reasons Leon’s novels are popular is because they avoid re-romanticizing Venice by showing us the city as particularly challenged by crime. The social commentary is also a significant part of her work, with Through a Glass, Darkly raising issues of environmental degradation (the price of glass?).

As with City of Fallen Angels, it takes a while to find a negative review, but it’s worth trying to find one, since these always provide starting points for discussion. Here is Glenn Harper, who writes for a noir fiction blog:

“I’ve never been sure what it is about Leon’s novels that I’ve found irritating, but this audio version helped me clarify my problem. Her narrative is curiously static, a series of “blackouts,” staged encounters among the characters involved in the mystery and in Brunetti’s conflicted relationships with his superiors and bureaucrats in general. These encounters move the story forward, but within each set-piece, not much happens except for conversation that is more or less indirect in relation to the murder at the center of the story. This method works very well to edge the reader toward Leon’s famous inconclusive endings (her murderers rarely seem to go to jail, protected by family, by conspiracies of silence, and by the powers that be in Venice). But the novels are hardly thrillers, and there’s frequently not much going on. In the case of Through the Glass Darkly, a lot of these scenes are quite funny, in satirical and ironic dialogues that Brunetti has with his wife, with the estimable Signorina Elettra, with his boss the Vice Questore, and with various workers and their families on the island of Murano. There are also, of course, numerous grotesqueries regarding the murder, but curiously, a gruesome death draws little comic interplay among the presumably hardened cops–most of whom flee the scene retching.”

(http://internationalnoir.blogspot.com/2008/02/donna-

leon-through-glass-darkly.html)

There is some truth to what Harper is complaining about, but rather than taking us away from the “action,” I found these scenes interesting in their removal from the immediate necessities of the “who-dunnit.” We get a LOT of character development, as well as some interesting sidebar chacacters (in my next post I’ll have a brief note about Scarpa, Brunetti’s superior (not the Vice-Questore but another investigator) and the mysterious Mary Dox, whose function in the “narrative device” is to get the plot moving. But back to the sidebar scenes that Harper objects to: these are the life of the novel, in essence: Brunetti staring at the workmanship of glass vessels in an exhibit, as well as the two domestic scenes in which we get numerous details about the food. What Harper calls “indirect in relation to the murder at the center of the story,” I find a welcome riff on the way that detective novels usually proceed, which is all too direct. Still, Harper’s observation is accurate: we don’t even get a body until page 159 (!!), about halfway through the novel. Compare this with Chandler’s violent accumulation of bodies that always seem to produce a victim by the end of the first few chapters.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that this is a “non-case” (126) and that Brunetti isn’t quite free to conduct the investigation in the open without fearing that his boss will fire him. Here is another instance of the “indirection” that I think ultimately makes this novel’s unusual pacing (for its genre) exceptional: “Brunetti’s experience and his reading of history had led him to believe that, given the right pressure, almost anyone could be moved to confess to anything.” (149) As a reader of history rather than literature (which his wife studies in an academic capacity), Brunetti’s approach to reality inherently recognizes the equivalent that ‘history is written by the victors’ and is ‘always-already’ subjective.

Brunetti offers a favorable match with Poe’s recipe for the discerning hero of the detective novel, who must “makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information obtained, lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe.” (Poe. “Murders in the Rue Morgue” online text; see also “The Purloined Letter” as well as the Lacan essay that literary theorists have had a field day with.)

There are also moments of wonderful description that Leon is well known for and that provide a literary quality to the prose. On his way to see the body early in the morning, Brunetti sees a historical apparition, something he had

“…only seen in photos taken in the early part of the last century: the mirror-smooth waters of the Grand Canal.” (…) “He stood transfixed and looked on what his ancestors had seen: the same light, the same facades, the same windows and plants, and the same vital silence. And, as far as he could distinguish the reflections, it all existed in double.” (161)

For Book Club Discussion this Saturday July 26, 10:00 - 12:00:

David Francis, davidtfrancis@hotmail.com
Domestic interludes
214 – 228
255 – 263

Mary Dox
132 – 133
150 – 152
156 – 157
298 – 300

Details of the murder

183
185
199 – 200
230 – 232
238

Dante’s Inferno

186
208 – 210
234 – 235

Scarpa

150
152—153
238
317 – 318