We have already spoken about Peter Lovesey on other occasions, so I will not talk about his biography. I will only say that one of his two successful series, that of Peter Diamond, started with a bang, as they say: the novel in which the character of Peter Diamond, Superintendent of Police, was inserted for the first time, was awarded the Anthony Award, one of the most important awards in the world, for detective literature, dedicated to the memory of Anthony Boucher.
The novel in question, The Last Detective, is the one I want to talk about.
Warning: Spoilers !
It begins with a woman's corpse that is found floating in Chew Valley Lake near Bristol. The corpse is completely naked, the belly is very swollen and the features are obviously distorted due to the presumed time in the water and the decomposition.
Since the Bristol police have to deal with it, it is Peter Diamond who coordinates the investigation. The first time we see him, Peter Diamond is lying on a gurney in the morgue and is taking a nap. Already this entrance of the main character of a series designates him as a classic anti-hero: could we ever find Ellery Queen or Poirot lying on a stretcher that presumably has been used other times to transport corpses? Never! Peter Diamond instead is presented to us like this. And so he already becomes a very unconventional character, who wins over the reader.
Nothing is known about the body, except that perhaps she was married, since her ring finger has the shape of a ring that has been removed, nor is the forensic pathologist Doctor Merlin (note the name alluding to Merlin, the Arthurian wizard) able to formulate any valid hypothesis, given the considerable time spent in water: there are no signs of violence on the body, nor does the toxicological test reveal anything (but the toxicological test is the least reliable, because when a body is immersed in water for a long time, due to an osmotic effect, the water is absorbed by the body, and the blood is diluted with the consequence that the concentration of any substance at the blood level is diluted to such an extent that nothing can be found with certainty), except for certain petechial spots in the eyes and certain other things that would suggest some type of suffocation, for example with a pillow. All the missing person reports are examined, but nothing is found, until a stroke of luck allows the body to be named. It is Geraldine Snoo in Jackman, a former TV star famous for the series "The Milners", a beautiful woman, with reddish brown hair. She was married to Professor Jackman, an academic from the English faculty of the University of Bath. It is easy to understand why he is the suspect for his wife's wife. Even more so when we learn that he had met a woman, a certain Dana Didrikson, whose twelve-year-old son he had saved from drowning, with whom he had started a friendship, much frowned upon by Geraldine. Probably also because of this friendship and a series of arguments caused by Gerry's depression, who after leaving the series, had found nothing else to impersonate, Jackman tells of an attempt to kill him by his wife, who had set fire to the pavilion in the garden where her husband was resting. But just when the net is tightening around the man, evidence is found that he was elsewhere on the presumed day of his wife's death, September 11. Also because of some letters by Jane Austen, which are at the center of an exhibition that the English department is organizing in Bath, which were lent by Dana Dikrinson, had been stolen and therefore Gregory Jackman had gone to Paris to see Professor Junker, who he had hosted a few days earlier, to examine the possibility that the letters had been "unknowingly" stolen by him. The plot goes on to the point that Dikrinson herself, who is secretly in love with Jackman, is arrested when the prosecution proves that in the trunk of the Mercedes, which the woman drives on behalf of a company that imports toys from the East, Snoo's body was incontrovertibly transported before being thrown into the water; and at that point Diamond, who was forced to resign by police officers envious of him, together with Jackman, who also fell in love with the woman, will try to save her by nailing the responsibility to the one who disposed of the body and at the same time tried to have the woman incriminated. Thus the death of the former actress will be intertwined with a cocaine trafficking, and the theft of the letters. In a final whirlwind, typical of the best novels, the sweet Dana will be saved, the bad guy will be incriminated for a series of crimes but not for murder, while on the last page of the novel we learn the identity of the murderer, completely astonishing, but not that much.
The End of the Spoilers
Superb mystery novel this one by Lovesey.
Lovesey's class as a narrator covers several levels:
he creates an anti-heroic character, a big and massive man, who sleeps on morgue stretchers, and who prefers old-fashioned investigation, made of witness statements, knowledge of places, stakeouts and tireless documentary research, to electronic devilry, who is respected by his subordinates for his subtle investigative art that uses psychological techniques: he alternates tough interrogations, with interrogations hidden in friendly chats, in some pub perhaps, drinking beer and swallowing toasts and who when he falls into disgrace, not only resigns but at fifty and over agrees to work as Santa Claus in shopping malls and a bouncer in pubs to support the family;
when he talks about the corpse he doesn't dwell on macabre cadaveric forensic details, nor on particular problems that can arise with a corpse in water for a long time: in this regard, I cite the beginning of the novel which is practically similar to that of Whisky for Small Glasses by Denzel Meyrick, a contemporary Scottish author, who instead dwells on revolting cadaveric details and who inserts the plot of drug trafficking as the basis or almost the basis of the investigation: it is clear that he had read Lovesey's novel. Who instead glosses over macabre themes, and does so by saying that Diamond does not like to attend the autopsy sessions to which he sends his subordinates. In this he chooses not to run on the same level as other authors who give in to the flattery of the forensic anatomist thriller (Patricia Cornwell and Katy Reichs, up to Denzel Meyrick), but he inserts plots that rarely enter into a mystery, such as drug trafficking, in such a way that the mystery itself is not distorted and remains as such; inserts more or less direct references to mysteries of the past: it is no coincidence that in this novel, the long-time reader will find references to similar cases: from The Witness for the Prosecution, by Agatha Christie, to Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers;
alternates phases of classic mystery of a deductive circumstantial type with phases of mystery of a more psychological nature: an example of a brilliant clue in orienting the investigations and which explains all of Gerry's strange and paranoid attitudes, and also the theft of the letters, is the importance given to the disappearance of the mirror. How a mirror can overturn the investigations followed up to that point, and provide a former police officer with the key to open a whole series of doors of circumstantial evidence, was something that only Lovesey could have invented.
The quality of the mystery, of a mystery that does not even give up the deductive, lies in the fact that the tension is linked to the various subplots anchored to the central one, the death of Gerry SnooIl, and allows you to read the novel as if it were a thriller, being the development, a whirlwind succession of different and explosive situations that even see the main character, Peter Diamond almost killed, and saved by the boy who in turn had been saved long before by Jackman., and who although in pain from the concussion suffered, does everything to save the victim awaiting sentencing.
The ending is sentimental.
Extraordinary novel by Lovesey.
Unforgettable.
Pietro De Palma
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