Cosi Fan Tutti: An Aurelio Zen Mystery

%% This is a multi-book review: SEE also the title "The Burglar in the Library". %% The comic crime novel is necessarily a peculiar animal. When writers make murder the occasion for laughter, they risk painting themselves into an obviously artificial corner. Dead bodies are intrinsically unfunny in real life, so when they become an excuse to demonstrate wit and cleverness, we know that the terra under our feet is no longer particularly firma. Not that most people mind: the comedic capering that takes place when Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen careens about Oxford, or when the gentle folk of Maggody, Arkansas, bumble into another batch of dead guys, offers a wonderful alternative to the real world--all the entertaining trappings of daily life without its ugly underside. The best comic crime writers have mastered walking the thin line between artificial and real: tilt too much toward the artificial, and your comedy sinks to the level of puppet show; get too real, on the other hand, and suddenly you're not very funny anymore. The authors of these two masterful crime novels don't just walk that thin line; they dance on it, laughing at the form that sustains them while twisting it in some altogether original and hilarious ways.At first glance, The Burglar in the Library, the latest Bernie Rhodenbarr caper, might look like just another English country house mystery. Not exactly. The house is in upstate New York, and Bernie is no Miss Marple. As his fans know from the previous seven Burglar novels, Bernie is a thief who, between capers, runs a Greenwich Village bookstore. His problem is that, in the course of his thieving, he keeps stumbling onto dead bodies and being forced to solve the crime in order to keep committing crimes of his own. This time, he thinks he's on vacation, albeit a working vacation, since his real reason for being at Cuttleford House is to steal a first edition of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep not just any first edition, but one purportedly inscribed by Chandler to Dashiell Hammett. With his best pal, Carolyn, in tow--she's substituting for Bernie's former lover, who dumped him to get married--Bernie sets off to steal a hard-boiled novel and winds up the hero in an English country house mystery.That's typical of Block. The Rhodenbarr novels are full of clever references to other books and movies. (In The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart, Bernie finds himself reliving the plot of Casablanca.) All of this is terrific fun, of course, but it is also Block's way of dealing with the problem of artificial versus real. By having his characters constantly laugh at the absurd idea that they are living in a book--and a formulaic, unreal book at that--he disarms the reader completely, leaving us happily disoriented yet perfectly primed to enjoy life in the Rhodenbarr fun house.In Cosi Fan Tutti, Michael Dibdin plays even more daringly with the artificial aspects of the comic mystery. Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series is typically not a comic production. Zen is a world-weary Italian, comfortable with corruption, who can't seem to keep himself from trying to solve cases he should ignore. The solutions, though, usually bring more chaos than order, the world of Polanski's Chinatown rather than the country house mystery. And yet, here he is, Aurelio Zen, living in the middle of a comic opera. The action of this latest Zen novel, you see, parallels the plot of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutti, complete with a Naples setting, a plot about lovers testing the fidelity of their mates, and chapter titles lifted straight from the Da Ponte libretto. And yet, the story itself is a believable Zen adventure in which the would-be corrupt cop once again lands in an enormous muddle encompassing bureaucrats, criminals, friends, and lovers.Patching together quotes from two philosophers, Zen remarks in the novel's last chapter that in life "everything happens twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." And that, of course, is exactly what this multileveled, wildly entertaining novel is all about. Aurelio Zen's life, twisted just a few degrees, moves from Chinatown to opera buffa. The same, Dibdin suggests, could be said of all our lives, and it is that tantalizing prospect that gives this unique story its zest--and its appeal to lovers of Mozart, Italy, crime fiction, and the joys of the absurd. ((Reviewed April 15, 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews

Assigned to Naples, policeman Aurelio Zen takes time to assist a local wealthy widow: he refuses to let her daughters marry their supposedly Mafia-connected fiancés. Soon involved in a case of murder and mistaken for Mafia himself, Zen plays out Dibdin's (Dark Spector, LJ 12/95) version of a darkly comic opera. Copyright 1998 Library Journal Reviews

In this spry new mystery constructed along comically operatic lines, Italian copper Aurelio Zen (Dead Lagoon, etc.) finds that his quest for the simpler life leads to a new beat in Naples and to a series of convoluted criminal conundrums. A garbage truck prowls the streets, slaughtering several notable organized crime figures; a mystery man posing as an American sailor is involved in a fracas at the port; and ownership of a pirated software game is called into question. Zen meanwhile stumbles into a whole new identity for himself and gives aid to the handsome widow of a mobster, who is anxious to rid herself of her two pretty young daughters' lowlife suitors. Zen employs the most alluring hookers he can find to entice the dutiful young men away. There are a wealth of cute moments: Zen running stark naked through the widow's apartment; Zen wildly extemporizing his way out of trouble with a superior officer. The operatic notions and a general absence of realism allow Dibdin free reign for flights of fancy and copious coincidence. Dibdin (Dark Spectre), a supremely skilled author able to fashion the mystery form into an endless series of deft variations, demonstrates an especially witty facet of his rich talent here. (May) Copyright 1998 Publishers Weekly Reviews