“Mafiosi are mistrustful by nature. When they wake up every morning, the first thing they think about is how to go out and screw their neighbor, taking special care to sniff out the slightest risk to themselves of falling into the same trap; if they get ripped off, it can lead to a dangerous and uncontrollable drop in their popularity within the shark-infested social network of their crime family.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (SEP 29, 2010)

If you’re a fan of Italian crime fiction, then reading Massimo Carlotto is a necessity. This author dubbed the “king of Mediterranean Noir” creates bleak worlds in which his Nietzschean anti-heroes struggle to survive. I “discovered” Carlotto in 2007 through Death’s Dark Abyss and The Goodbye Kiss. These excellent crime tales remain some of the darkest Italian noir I’ve ever stumbled across. The Fugitive, a brilliant true account of the author’s life on the run came next, and then last year Poisonville, a novel which addressed the connection between Italy’s toxic waste crisis and the Mafia.

Bandit Love has the feel of a buddy novel, but the relationship of those buddies is entrenched in past lives of crime. The buddies in the novel are ex-con turned unlicensed PI Marco Burrati (aka the Alligator), gangster Beniamino Rossini, and Max la Memoria (Max the Memory). Burrati and Max, now trying to go straight, are co-owners of a bar named La Cuccia, and here Max the Memory (also known as the Fat Man) endlessly cooks his favourite recipes. For their camaraderie and implicit faith in one another, these three characters could easily have strolled out of the Jean-Pierre Melville film Le Cercle Rouge. The action in Bandit Love, however, mostly takes place in Italy, and while it does include a heist, the story centres on the disappearance of Rossini’s belly dancer lover, Sylvie.

The mystery of Sylvie’s disappearance takes place early in the novel, and it’s an event that pulls together the three friends, former partners in crime as they pool resources to hunt for Sylvie. Sylvie’s disappearance takes place in 2006, but as Burrati digs around for clues, he realizes that Sylvie’s disappearance is not a random act, and instead it’s part of a complex chain of events that began in 2004. While Sylvie’s disappearance seems to be a component of an elaborate revenge, Burrati, who’s the main character here, concedes that they’re in a quagmire involving the Serbian organized crime, the Kosovar Mafia and the burglary of a stash of drugs from a laboratory storeroom.

Burrati, who’s in his 40s, drifting along, largely unwilling to commit to anything particularly serious in life, and attracted to dangerous women, is a great character. Here’s Burrati’s PI ethic when it comes to cheating spouses he’s been paid to catch:

“The client was sacred, but then one day it dawned on me that the universe of suspicious spouses deserves only to have its wallets emptied and that, all things considered, cheating on your husband or wife is just one of the many ways of making it through the day, or night. What really pounded the concept into my head was a blonde from Mestre, just outside Venice, who caught me following her one day. She used highly persuasive arguments and tones. “At work, my boss busts my chops, my daughter’s going to have to wear her braces for another two years, and my husband is a regular guy, but I might have been a little overhasty when I decided he was the man of my dreams,” she said practically without a pause. “So I step out on him occasionally; nothing serious, just a bout of pure sex, and then I feel better. Can you understand that?” I nodded and then shared a couple of tricks with her to keep the man to whom she’d sworn eternal fidelity from getting too suspicious.”

Burrati’s world is full of edgy, violent criminals, ambitious Mafiosi, crooked cops, and greedy lowlifes, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that one of the other great characters is a professional snitch-cum-prostitute, the seductive Morena, a woman Burrati can’t quite resist even though he should know better:

“She had tried working in a number of legal venues, but nothing worked out. She was very attractive, she knew how to dress, and she started frequenting the best places in town. After a succession of failed relationships with the sons of wealthy businessmen, she started sniffing cocaine and turning the occasional discreet trick. Occasional, carefully considered, and well paid. Nonetheless, she found herself in trouble with the law. Luckily for her, a compassionate cop with nice manners pointed out an alternative, explaining that she knew lots of things, valuable information that could be worth cold hard cash on the right market.”

Bandit Love’s weakness is that it squashes so much into a fairly slim novel. With a large number of characters–some of whom share a sordid past–it’s hard to keep the story (which is spread over 5 years) straight. At the same time, characters who never appear are mentioned, and for this reason, Bandit Love had the feel of a series novel. First-in-the-series novels are generally weaker as they serve as portals to other worlds. Carlotto’s website details all the books, and reveals that there are five so far–including two others translated into English: The Master of Knots and The Columbian Mule.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 reader2
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (September 28, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Massimo Carlotto
EXTRAS:	Publisher page on Bandit Love
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Death’s Dark Abyss The Goodbye Kiss Poisonville The Fugitive

Bibliography:

The Alligator Series:

• The Colombian Mule (2001; 2005 in US)
• The Master of Knots (2002; January 2014)
• Bandit Love (2009; 2010 in US)

Stand-alone Mystery:

• The Goodbye Kiss (2003; 2005 in US)
• Death’s Dark Abyss (2004; 2006 in US)
• Poisonville (2009) (written with Marco Videtta)
• At the End of a Dull Day (May 2013 in US)

Autobiography:

• The Fugitive (1995; 2007 in US)

“What bound them together was much more important than sex.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (OCT 17, 2009)

I first came across Italian author Massimo Carlotto in 2006 when I read Death’s Dark Abyss and The Goodbye Kiss. Death’s Dark Abyss is a tale of long-simmering revenge as a man plots against the killer of his wife and child, and The Goodbye Kiss is the story of an amoral career criminal who’s living a straight life when his past comes back to haunt him. In Death’s Dark Abyss, the main character has nothing whatsoever to lose whereas in The Goodbye Kiss, the protagonist stands to lose newly earned social status and affluence. Both scenarios create dangerous characters, and these very different Ubermenschen take fate into their own hands and move beyond traditional morality in these dark, nihilistic novels. After reading these two books, both freshly translated for Europa Editions, I was committed to reading everything in print by Carlotto, and so I was delighted to read Poisonville, also published by Europa Editions. Poisonville is co authored with screenwriter Marco Videtta and translated by Antony Shugaar.

Set in the industrialized northeast region of Italy, Poisonville begins with the brutal murder of lawyer Giovanni Barovier, fiancée of Francesco Visentin, another lawyer and son of the area’s second richest family. Francesco hasn’t had time to absorb the shock of Giovanni’s death when he learns that she had a secret lover. With jealousy as a motive for murder, the police investigation begins to turn towards Francesco. He has an alibi–he was fighting with Giovanni’s ex-lover, Filippo Renier, the scion of the region’s richest family, the son of the autocratic Contessa Selvaggia. Filippo denies the fight and claims he wasn’t with Francesco at the time of Giovanni’s murder, and so Francesco’s alibi melts away. Then forensic evidence is damaged, Francesco becomes the number one suspect, and meanwhile “puddle shark” newscaster Adalberto Beggiolin has a field day with the headlines:

“He was hardly a sniper with a high-precision rifle. He was more comfortable working with a sawn-off shotgun. If you shoot into the crowd, you’re sure to hit something. He looked on newsgathering as an activity akin to carpet bombing. In his view, good reporting resulted in bleeding, screaming victims.”

Poisonville is narrated by Francesco–a man whose grief for his lost fiancée turns rapidly to anger and then determination to catch the killer. His hunt for the truth uncovers some of the unpleasant business deals of the town’s most powerful families–a town in which money and power have moved into new lucrative business partnerships with the eco-mafia.

As a protagonist, Francesco represents a change of pace for Carlotto. Francesco is no Ubermensch. In fact he is fairly clueless about some shady deals going down right under his nose, but the creation of Francesco as a far-from-effective man of action seems deliberate on the authors’ part. Filippo, Giovanni and Francesco represent the newest generation of the town’s oldest families. Giovanni, a promising young lawyer is dead, Filippo is a nut-job dilettante with a mother fixation, and Francesco can’t get out from underneath his father’s shadow. This generation seems to lack the strong stuff of their parents. In contrast, Filippo’s mother, Contessa Selvaggia is “a remarkable piece of work” feared and respected by the locals. She married well and now controls the family fortune with an iron fist. Francesco’s father, Antonio Visentin is a wily, highly respected lawyer whose influence spreads throughout the region. Only Giovanni seemed to possess the drive of the earlier generation–a generation tempered and trained by fascism & the rise of the mafia, but Giovanni’s promise is trashed by her violent death. In creating the feeble-minded twisted Filippo, and the largely impotent Francesco, Carlotto and Videtta underscore the notion that today’s Italy is facing a new enemy within–an enemy that modern-day Italy is ill-prepared to combat.

On a final note, the cover of Poisonville carried a small insignia–World Noir. Let’s hope there’s more to come….

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (September 29, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Massimo Carlotto
EXTRAS:	Publisher page on Poisonville
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of other Massimo Carlotto books: Bandit Love The Fugitive Death’s Dark Abyss The Goodbye Kiss And more “Mediterranean noir:” Jean-Claude Izzo Batya Gur

Bibliography:

The Alligator Series:

• The Colombian Mule (2001; 2005 in US)
• The Master of Knots (2002; January 2014)
• Bandit Love (2009; 2010 in US)

Stand-alone Mystery:

• The Goodbye Kiss (2003; 2005 in US)
• Death’s Dark Abyss (2004; 2006 in US)
• Poisonville (2009) (written with Marco Videtta)
• At the End of a Dull Day (May 2013 in US)

Autobiography:

• The Fugitive (1995; 2007 in US)