The Flying Boat Mystery

by Franco Vailati

  Luigi peeled a second orange with an ill-concealed pleasure. It was a red orange, his favourite kind. In a religious silence, under the patient eyes of his public, he made the bloody slices disappear, whilst the others used the pause to try and rearrange their very confused thoughts. As usual, Vallesi was the mouthpiece of their doubts and of their collective amazement:

  ‘But this evening... why are we here? Why did we come to Pozzuoli? And the crate, the car chase, the dead body... what’s the meaning of all this madcap nightmare of an adventure? How could you foresee that....’

  The assistant commissioner looked with great satisfaction at the remains of his feast on the white-clothed table. He was about to answer his friend, but this time he was preceded by Bertini:

  ‘Our friend Renzi was convinced within a few days of Marsigli’s guilt, and had fully understood the stunning flying boat trick, but he had no real, concrete evidence. The flying boat trick was a total failure, because it missed its real objective: to deceive us about the real scene of the crime, and redirect our investigations to a place where the dead banker had never been, pushing us to ask ourselves vainly and ineffectively how and why he had vanished, when his disappearance had happened far before the take-off in a completely different place. But even this failure of a trick could guarantee the culprits’ safety, because, by changing the time, the circumstances and the scene of the crime, it successfully hampered our investigation of the real disappearance. The Sabelli Murder Case and the shooting of Maria Agliati provided no clues at all, because neither the notorious phone numbers on Sabelli’s suitcase nor Agliati’s and Marsigli’s crooked escapades during the war could constitute real evidence against the banker’s killers. So we had to act, to push our opponents with a daring move to make a very false step, forcing them to unmask themselves by their own hand. And that was their third mistake, a mistake suggested and forced on them by our friend Renzi with a very skilful trick. Your friend stole your thunder, dear Vallesi, and he himself wrote that silly article in Il Messaggero, asserting with such great eloquence the ridiculous, absurd theory of Agliati’s suicide.’

  ‘Now I understand Galbiati’s demeanour, and his ironic phrases about Luigi’s praise for the article,’ exclaimed Giorgio. ‘And his zealously obedient acceptance of his chief’s enthusiastic remarks!’

  The assistant commissioner limited himself to a smile while Bertini continued:

  ‘The article’s effect was immediate. The killers were worried because our investigation of the flying boat mystery and of the shooting of Signora Agliati was not going in the direction they had hoped and expected. But they still believed in our mock pretence of total ignorance about everything, Sabelli’s murder included. Thus reassured, they thought to solve with one single move every problem to their complete satisfaction. If the police believed in Agliati’s suicide and were searching for his dead body on the coast between Ostia and Naples, they would be happy to provide them with the required corpse, to the general and total satisfaction of everybody.’

  ‘But why did they drag the corpse to Pozzuoli Point?’

  ‘Because of a simple question of forensic medicine, my dear Vallesi. After a number of days underwater, a corpse presents a totally different state of decay from another one buried in a garden. Agliati’s was in a garden, not in the sea, so they had to leave his body on land, in a very dry place, far away from water and from the coast. Furthermore, it was possible, even after a week, to damage a body in such a way as to give the impression of a fall from the sky. But in its journey, the plane had flown over only one place at a convenient distance from the sea, and that was Pozzuoli Point. So it was quite easy for us to anticipate where they would go. And you can check for yourself how our predictions were correct. ’

  He pointed out of the restaurant’s terrace to the powerful Dilambda in the parking lot, mournfully reflecting its master’s disgrace, possibly rejoicing in the excitement of the night’s escapade and anticipating all the adventures that fate might have in store for such a magnificent, classy roadster.

  A week after, Luigi Renzi visited the Arteni’s swanky mansion to present his congratulations for the betrothal of Marcella and Giorgio Vallesi, and, incidentally, hoping to be congratulated for his recent appointment as High Commissioner at the Alba Police Department. The Arteni-Vallesi marriage was fixed for October and the household was duly excited by the nuptial preparations. Vallesi met him at the door, almost transformed by the magic of love as the new Master of the Swanky House. After the foreseeable exchange of congratulations, the obvious object of any conversation was The Great Flying Boat Mystery.

  ‘For you, it was really a great success, my dear Luigi. Every newspaper is praising you for your redoubtable sleuthing skill!’

  Luigi’s attempt at a humble smile was unsuccessful.

  ‘Ah, I still can’t believe how you managed to solve the Vanishing Act Trick. The Double Act was masterfully organized and executed! And I, in the meantime.... ’

  ‘You? ’ Luigi seemed apparently lost in his humble, self-effacing thoughts.

  ‘I was chasing Agliati’s phantom in Mergellina Station, running after a cloaked and muffled and totally innocent fellow from Naples to Rome! A marvellous wild goose chase! Ah, what a blunder! Ah, what an ass I was!’

  ‘Well, it was quite a blunder, I agree, but.... ’

  ‘But? ’ asked Vallesi in his usual aggressive way.

  ‘You were chasing wild geese, and you caught instead a gorgeous, magnificent butterfly. Next time, I promise, I will follow your example. A splendid butterfly is far better than a disappearing dead banker, I’m afraid. Butterflies can fly. Bankers apparently not,’ and he mournfully took a tasty canapé from a silver salver.

  THE END

  THE ITALIAN MYSTERY NOVEL

  The first mystery about the Italian mystery novel is whether it exists as an identifiable genre or whether it is merely a concoction of publishers and newspaper reporters. To be sure, there were many mystery novels written and published in Italian during the thirties, but whether they constituted an original national school is highly arguable. Is there a distinctive Italian style of mystery in the same way there is a distinctive French or Japanese one?

  Most Italian writers were not very imaginative: they copied massively from foreigners, and they set their own plots either in a very artificial foreign city—such as London, Paris, Boston, or Rio—or an exceedingly localised Rome or Milan or Palermo, populated by hordes of macchiette (colourful indigenous characters). Italy had no interest in fantastic literature (science fiction is even more poorly represented than mystery in our bedevilled local production), and completely missed the great chance offered by the rise of popular fiction in the Nineteenth Century; we never had an Italian Stevenson, or Verne, or Wells, and so we never had our own Poe or Doyle or Gaboriau, even though their works were greatly beloved and reprinted from their first appearance. So authentic Italian mystery fiction essentially started from scratch in the thirties, when Italian publisher Mondadori decided that a bevy of local authors could be added to the foreign ones in its stable. But it was an artificial decision, rather than a natural development of Italian popular literature.

  The first such writer, Alessandro Varaldo, wrote no locked room mysteries, and his cases of Ascanio Bonichi, a philosophical policeman who opened the way to many other Italian ancestors of Commander Dalgliesh, do not make easy reading nowadays. Varaldo’s work was dominated by the influence of coincidence and chance on the solution of a mystery; he was not a fan of rational deductive reasoning, and his moody, rambling cases were too richly populated by exceedingly colourful Roman characters. Bonichi was a strong believer in hypnotism and mesmerism, so his cases featured a lot of hypnotized murderers or sleepwalking thieves, which are unlikely to satisfy a rational Anglo-Saxon reader.

  The second and more famous Italian writer was Augusto De Angelis. His Commissario (Chief Inspector) De Vincenzi was another philosopher, similar to Bonichi, but De Angelis—influenced as he was b
y Wallace and Van Dine—made him solve more interesting and absorbing cases. De Angelis only skirted the impossible crime in L’Albergo delle tre rose (The Hotel of the Three Roses) , Il Mistero delle tre orchidee (The Mystery of the Three Orchids), and above all Il Do tragico, the semi-impossible murder of an opera singer during a radio exhibition (partially based on an Edgar Wallace trick). But his novels are well-written and highly interesting (Il Mistero do Cinecitta, La Gondola della morte, Il Mistero della vergine, Le Sette picche doppiate are other remarkable De Vincenzi cases).

  Another great writer who never actually used the locked room ploy was Giorgio Scerbanenco, a Russian refugee influenced by Queen and Van Dine. Scerbanenco set his very interesting cases in America and his detective was Arthur Jelling, a Reeder-like archivist in the Boston Police Department. He used the Queenesque negative clue very effectively in l’Antro dei filosofi, a very moody and bleak murder story in a very Queenesque eccentric family, possibly related to the Hatters of the Tragedy of Y. Other notable Jelling cases were La Bambola cieca, Sette giorni di preavviso, and Il Cane che parla, and they are all highly interesting and well-written. As a plotter, Scerbanenco was less amateurish and rambling than De Angelis, and far more orthodox in his use of detection and logical deductions. Later in the Sixties he began a very famous Noir series with unfrocked and disbarred surgeon Duca Lamberti, but these cases are, for me, far more imitative and commonplace than the highly ingenious and original Jelling cases.

  The third Italian Grand Master of Mystery again wrote no locked room novels, even if he was very influenced by French mystery literature, and particularly by Leroux and Simenon. Ezio D'Errico was a surrealistic painter and an exponent of the Futurists, tied to the Paris surrealists. His Commissaire Richard was clearly an imitation of Maigret, but his Paris was far more colourful and lively than the bleak, foggy town described by Simenon. D'Errico had the wit to blend other, more fantastic influences with Simenon in his personal cocktail (particularly Leroux and the French Grand-Guignol) and Richard was confronted by far more picturesque murderers than his Belgian ancestor. In La Famiglia Morel, D'Errico invented a very interesting and politically incorrect trick for hiding a highly surprising culprit. In Il Naso di cartone, Richard uncovered a very clever motivation for the apparent madness of a serial-killer who put a comical Mardi Gras cardboard nose on his victims. Other highly original and wonderfully well-written Richard cases were La Scomparsa del defino, La Casa inhabitable, and La Donna che ha visto.

  The fourth ace of the Italian Hand was Tito Spagnol, a screenwriter who worked with Frank Capra. Spagnol invented a Van Dinesque detective, Al Gusman, very much like Ellery Queen and having the great distinction of being published in France in the remarkable Gallimard Detective collection before being published in Italy. Again, Gusman solved no impossible cases, but both L’Unghia del leone and La Notte impossible are highly interesting Italian masterpieces of murder and detection. La Notte impossible, for instance, embellished a trick from a Parker Pyne short story by Agatha Christie, developing it into a full-length novel of murder in a closed mansion with a strong Queenian flavour, and using it with the outrageously extreme ingenuity of a Leroux. It's the only use of this very original trick in novel form, to the best of my knowledge, and one can only dream about what could have been made of it by Queen or Christie, if she had made it into a novel instead. In the late Thirties, Spagnol decided to set a more local (and highly praised) detective series, narrating the investigations of a catholic priest named Don Poldo, set in his native Veneto . He was not an Italian Father Brown because his cases lacked the creepy, weird and fantastic metaphysical complexity of GKC: Don Poldo was far nearer to a mild English vicar solving cases in a Miss-Marple-St.Mary Mead-like setting, but in La Bambola insanguinata he did solve one of the many classic semi-impossible murders typical of the Italian version of this beautiful subgenre, so unclassifiable for the despairing critic

  Thus it was, sad to say, that the locked room puzzle in Italy was the province of less famous and expert authors, and the only book by Franco Vailati, the very novel you have just read, is certainly the best and most original example by an Italian writer.

  Another very good deviser of locked room plots was Carlo Martinelli,a minor author who, after World War II, rewrote his exploits of a French detective named De Galmain and transformed them into the cases of a more American shamus named Mooney (partially inspired again by Ellery Queen):both l’Impossibile verita (aka La Morte chiama nel buio) and his masterpiece Il Segreto di una notte (aka E Il giorno nuovo spunto) are well-deserving of attention, particularly the latter with its locked room murders in a closed mansion.

  Another minor practitioner of locked room murders was Guglielmo Somalvico, author of technically complex (if a bit improbable) impossible crimes, boldly explained with plans and diagrams—a sort of minor Italian Rupert Penny. Il Delitto invisibile, with an impossible murder on a bridge, is easiest to find, but is unfortunately his least-interesting murder story. Far more rewarding are the very rare Il Microfono sulla tomba and La Torcia umana,with its apparently ubiquitous killer, reminiscent of Noel Vindry’s Le Double alibi (The Double Alibi)

  Magda Cocchia Adami painstakingly explained the mystery of a disappearing van in Il Furgone fantasma, famous translator Alfredo Pitta vaguely skirted impossible murder in Endertone e il delitto impossibile, and in the creepy but not very impossible Albergo della paura, offering to the reader a very surprising murderer and an interesting use of the haunted tree theme, many years before the wonderful and unsurpassed classic of the genre L’Arbre aux doigts tordus (The Vampire Tree) by Paul Halter. Alessandro De Stefani used a famous Poe trick quite comically to explain a series of locked cabin shipboard thefts in the humorous La Crociera del Colorado. Futurist Luciano Folgore devised a couple of locked room murder spoofs with ludicrous, absurd solutions in La Trappola colorata and in the short story “Il Castello degli echi.” Enzo Gemignani used a murderous room theme for his La Camera tragica,one of the many exploits of his Japanese sleuth Yama Koto, a Mister Moto imitation solving cases in Rio de Janeiro. Another Yama Koto case, Il Gran premio della morte, can loosely be considered the semi-impossible murder of a prize horse during a grand prix.

  Famous songwriter Vasco Mariotti was a very interesting writer of peculiar mystery novels, strongly influenced by Leroux and Maurice Renard. L’Uomo dai piedi di fauno is the fantastic, very Leroux-like story of a monstrous serial killer lurking in a grim, creepy and very phony Turin. La Valle del pianto grigio is his only locked room, partially based on a famous Conan Doyle trick and using a very Doylesque exotic revenge, using an effective flashback technique. Unfortunately the Pinocchio-like comic con artist-swindler sleuth nicknamed Lo Spennagrulli (the SuckerTrapper) renders this effort quite unpalatable and childish—a strange, uncanny blend of Doyle and Collodi—which is a pity because the melodramatic but sinister plot is not bad at all.

  However, a more famous and interesting Italian locked room mystery was not a novel but a stage play by the famous playwright and screenwriter Edoardo Anton. Il Serpente a sonagli, the story of a series of impossible murders of young students in a girls’college—only apparently based on the well-worn Speckled Band trick—was later adapted into a famous movie ,with some success.

  Italy’s catastrophic participation in World War II was the most impossible crime of them all, and it ended with the apocalyptic death of mystery and detection in my misguided country. For too many years the classic mystery was erased from the literary map by fanatical and uninformed critics. For too many years, thousand of adoring readers enjoyed the foreign books under the disapproving eye of dons, newspaper critics and other Arbiter Elegantiarum, unduly praising the tosh written by their own pets, the Italian mystery writers writing the only possible Italian way to murder: the completely unrealistic “realistic” and “regional” novels by utterly uninteresting authors, in many cases now justly forgotten, but condemning the Italian mystery to the localistic Ghetto and to the awful, barren wasteland of C
amilleri and Carofiglio which we are still living in today.

  As a result, Italian mystery readers were so scared by an Italian name on the cover of a book that they ran away even from good foreign writers with names like Pronzini or Brussolo. (That was also the reason why Steve Carella was called Carell in the Italian version of the 87th Precinct saga, and David Baldacci was called David B. Ford). So it was for too many decades that the locked room murder was laughed about by ignorant writers and critics and used only for epitomizing what the “good writer” was called to destroy in the Mystery genre. For ages, the only impossible murders to which readers had access were the many variants of the trick painstakingly devised by Italian writer Enzo Russo for his teenage mystery series, in which Italy’s answer to Nancy Drew, Rossana Da Valle, solved with zest and panache: the impossible disappearance of a schoolgirl on the stairs of her apartment building (Giusi e’scomparsa); the impossible killing of a private zoo owner apparently mangled by his pet tiger ( La Tigre del Bengala); the impossible kidnapping of an industrialist (Pasqua a Parigi); or the disappearance of a whole train (Il Vagone scomparso). Russo used the locked room trick again in an adult crime novel, but Villa Reale Residence somehow lacked the merry enjoyment of his children's books, and remained a well-written and well-devised effort, but a bit stilted.