The Hotel of the Three Roses (1936) by Augusto de Angelis

Back in 2016, Pushkin Vertigo introduced the world to the father of the Italian detective story, Augusto de Angelis, who created a homegrown detective story from scratch in the mid-1930s and faced tough opposition from snobby critics and Benito Mussolini's regime – declaring it was either absurd or dangerous to depict Italy as anything less than "a harmonious idyll." Sadly, the regime failed to see the irony in opposing the detective story and murdering De Angelis in 1944. 

You can't suppress the detective story by saying it's slanderous to a sleepy, peaceful Mediterranean country and then kick a mystery writer to death in the streets. It only proves that amateur reasoner of some celebrity had a point when he stated that crime is common and logic rare. Anyway...

During that nine-year period between 1935 and 1944, De Angelis managed to produce twenty detective novels starring his series-character, Inspector Carlo de Vincenzi. A detective who's "more complex than the British 'thinking machine' typified by Sherlock Holmes" and "more sensitive than the tough-guy American private eye," which would become a fairly typical description of the continental policeman character during the post-WWII era. For example, you can find them all over Dutch politieromans and German krimis.

I read Il banchiere assassinato (The Murdered Banker, 1935) in 2016 and immediately proved that the Italian detective story can't catch a break by (sort of) forgetting all about him. De Angelis only resumed his climb to the top of Mt. To-Be-Read when learning Kazabo Publishing had released a translation of Sei donne e un libro (Death in a Bookstore, 1936) in 2019 and almost coincided with Locked Room International publishing a translation of Franco Vailati's Ill mistero dell'idrovolante (The Flying Boat Mystery, 1935) – one of Italy's most famous and iconic locked room mysteries. So it was about time I returned to Milan to watch De Vincenzi disentangle another knotty problem. 

L'albergo delle tre rose (The Hotel of the Three Roses, 1936) is the seventh title in the series and takes place in December, 1919, at a dodgy, third-rate hotel where the guests "gamble furiously all night" as "if it were forced labour." The group of people staying, or living, at the Hotel of the Three Roses is as diverse and strange as you'd expect.

There's Bardi, the hunchback, who's been living at the hotel for ten years and is a "perpetual busybody." Giorgio Novarreno is a self-styled necromancer who rashly caved to his desire to demonstrate his divinatory powers to the grounded Inspector De Vincenzi. Carlo da Como used to have money, but is now down on his luck and scraps a living together by gambling, which does not prevent him from refusing to sell his last remaining property to his elder sisters out of spite. Vilfredo Engel is another permanent resident of the hotel, a gambler and friend of Da Como. Nicola Al Righetti is an American of Italian origin and claims to come from New York, but how he deals with a police interrogation shows he normally lives in Chicago. Stella Essington is a drug addicted actress who soothed her "the feverish agitation of her nerves" with cello music. Carin Nolan is a Norwegian girl about 19-years-old and presumably "the threatened innocent" of the story. Signora Mary Alton Vendramini is the heavily veiled widow of Major Alton and it was his will that summoned her to the hotel, which is also why his lawyer, George Flemington, is present. A pretty odd assortment of characters!

Inspector De Vincenzi receives an anonymous letter that the Hotel of the Three Roses is "a gathering of addicts and degenerates" where now "a horrible drama is brewing," which will blow up if they don't intervene in time – a warning that comes too late. Shortly after reading the note, De Vincenzi is called to the hotel to investigate the death of a young Englishman, Douglas Layng, whose body is hanging from a ceiling beam on the landing. However, the doctor determines he had been killed hours before the body was found by a stab in the back and that makes it a quasi-impossible crime. Where did the murderer hide the body all the time? Why did the murderer redressed the body? How did the murderer get the body to the landing? Everything the murderer did increased "difficulty and risks a hundredfold" and it wouldn't be the last the time the murderer had more freedom of movement than circumstances should have allowed for.

Inspector De Vincenzi is not only frustrated by suspects and witnesses unwilling to talk, give half-truths or simply stall before getting to the point, but even his own subordinates were very slapdash in carrying out his simple orders. Several times, the murderer was handed an opportunity to strike because the policemen tasked with guarding the place were not at their post. A second victim is murdered behind a locked door with the wide open window overlooking a wet, unguarded garden and the excuse of his second-in-command is that he didn't have "the heart to send a man out to stand in the rain." A third attack happens and the murderer appears to have been able to enter a room, unseen, while an officer sat guard outside in the corridor, but not as diligently as instructed. So the result is that the reader is constantly teased with potential locked room mysteries before they're immediately dispelled and snatched away.

There is, however, so much more to give De Vincenzi a headache than just lying suspects, unwilling witnesses and cavalier subordinates. Why did some of the guests brought a flaxen-haired, porcelain doll to the hotel and can the dolls be connected to the murders or a long-forgotten, Doylean episode that took place in the Transvaal during the Boer War, which involves crocodiles, diamonds and a "ghostly avenger" – whom everyone feared could be behind the murders. So, yeah, a lively detective novel with an oddball collection of gargoyles who frustrate the investigation every step of the way while the attacks continue right under the nose of the police. This makes for a fun, fast-paced detective story, but the finer details of the plot leaves something to be desired.

De Angelis unfortunately gave more attention and care to the red herrings and misdirecting the reader than properly clueing and dressing the bare bones of the plot, which hid a decent, perfectly acceptable scheme. So you can't really arrive at the (full) solution with the clues, or lack thereof, you're given and that always detracts from the overall quality of a detective story. No matter how good the storytelling or characterization is. What you're left with is a fun and amusing, but unmistakably second-string, mystery novel standing in the shadow of its American and British contemporaries.

Nonetheless, while not entirely perfect, the historical and political baggage of the Italian detective story makes even a second-string mystery novel an interesting exploration. You can see how government censorship had a hand in shaping the Italian Golden Age detective story as it eventually became illegal to depict Italians as criminals. So mystery writers had to resort to non-Italian characters, or foreign-born Italians, who were likely tainted. I wonder how many hotel and transportation mysteries there are from this period of the Italian detective story, because it would be most convenient way to write a story around a cast of mostly foreign characters. Since there are two more of De Angelis' novels available in English, I'll try to get to one of them before the end of 2021.

A Fine Italian Hand

"Perfect murder, sir? Oh, I'm sorry. There's no such thing as a perfect murder. That's just an illusion."

- Lt. Columbo (Now You See Him, 1976)

I'm not the most qualified person to comment on the detective story in Italy, but I've always been amazed at the apparent quantity of classically-styled crime-fiction available in that Mediterranean country – ranging from the Titans of the Golden Era to translations of Detective Conan and Paul Halter. But where there any Italian mystery novelists who participated in the Grandest Game in the World? The answer to that question is yes and one of the most illuminating figures from their nook of the genre has recently made an appearance in English! 

Augusto de Angelis is known as "the father of the Italian detective novel," whose series-character was Commissario Carlo de Vincenzi of the Squadra Mobile (Flying Squad) of Milan, but as interesting as his literary legacy were the final weeks of his life. De Angelis wrote during the days of Fascist rule in Italy and Il Duce's regime took a dim view of detective fiction, which they saw as glorifying criminal behavior and preferred a public image of an idyllic, crime-free Italy.

As a result, the Nestor of Italian crime-fiction was banned from the national bookshelves and De Angelis was eventually imprisoned as an anti-fascist in 1943, but his tragic end came upon being released and had a physical altercation with a group of fascists – sustaining serious injuries he was unable to recover from in his weakened state. This is, literally, the worst the fascist have done during their reign in Europe! What? They murdered a mystery writers! Name one thing they did was worse than that. Just one thing!

Earlier this year, Pushkin Vertigo, published Il banchiere assassinato (The Murdered Banker, 1935), which marked the (genre) debut of both De Angelis and Commissario De Vincenzi. Since then, there have been two additional translations: L'albergo delle tre rose (The Hotel of the Three Roses, 1936) and Il mistero delle tre orchidee (The Mystery of the Three Orchids, 1942).

So readers have an opportunity to sample some of the non-English Golden Age mystery fiction from a truly obscure and overlooked corner of the genre.

The Murdered Banker opens on a cold, foggy night and De Vincenzi receives an unexpected visitor in his office at the police station: his old school friend, Giannetto Aurigi, who seems not to be himself. Coincidentally, the ringing of the phone, "like three desperate screams," interrupts their conversation and De Vincenzi is summoned to an apartment at 45 via Montforte – which happened to be the home address of his friend.

An anonymous phone-call, reporting a murder, had lured Inspector Maccari to the apartment and there he discovered the body of a man in the sitting room: stretched out on the floor, clad in evening dress, with "a bullet hole in his temple." The body belonged to a wealthy banker, named Garlini, who's worth millions and Aurigi was in debt to him to the tune of "exactly five hundred and forty-three thousand lire." So that's a cut-and-dry motive right there, but the case turns out to be more complex than it appears on the surface.

There are a number of physical clues that obscure the matter, which range from a phial of perfume containing prussic acid, a stick of lipstick, a brace of revolvers, letters, receipts, ticket stubs and a clock that is running an hour fast, but there are also interconnecting relationships and hidden motives – forming "a disturbing web of mysterious and hidden facts." At the center of this web is "the fatal triangle," which consists of Aurigi and his fiancé, Maria Giovanna, who has a past with the tragic young man living in the attic apartment above Aurigi. On the sideline is Maria's father, Count Marchionni, who engaged the services of a private-eye, Harrington.

Harrington is an obvious nod to the detective-characters from the English speaking world and he even remarks how De Vincenzi only has to get his "little grey cells" working in order to solve the case. He was briefly setup as a rival detective, but, sadly, was sidelined well before the end of the story. I absolutely love rival detectives (e.g. Patrick Quentin's Black Widow, 1952), but Harrington was, perhaps, out of place in this book, because The Murdered Banker was written in the traditional of the police novels (roman policier) of continental Europe, which includes the work of Georges Simenon, A.C. Baantjer and Herbert Reinecker. The problem solvers in these books and TV-series are sober-minded, sensible and philosophical-prone policemen who often reach a solution by common sense thinking rather dazzling feats of deduction. And the solution also reflects this style of crime-fiction.

The identity of the murderer is slightly underwhelming and the plot turns out to be a simple, grubby kind of murder, "an ugly crime," but the killer did a wonderful job at obfuscating the whole business – basically committed one crime to cover-up another. So that part of the explanation was pure Golden Age and encourages to return to his work before too long.

While The Murdered Banker was not entirely perfect, I still found the book to be an interesting and rewarding read with a decent enough plot. I've always been curious about the Golden Age detective stories from non-English speaking countries, but only recently were some of these traditionally-styled mystery novels from France and Japan translated into English. And now we can add Italy to that list. So we're finally getting somewhere!

Finally, allow me to draw your attention to my previous review, Koromu no satsujin (Murder in the Red Chamber, 2004) by Taku Ashibe, which offers a feast of locked room mysteries and seemingly impossible situations. There are about seven of them. So that should pique the curiosity of some of you!