In Venice I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with Gregory Dowling, author of the Alvise Marangon novels and translator of a Venetian classic, The Lover of No Fixed Abode, now available for the first time in English from Bitter Lemon Press.
Gregory is a fascinating chap, Professor of American Literature at Ca’ Foscari, a long-term resident of the city, an expert scholar on Lord Byron, and a selfless and generous source of advice for itinerant foreign authors drifting through the city in search of local colour.
He’s certainly saved my skin a good few times when I stumbled over one of the many more obscure pitfalls those of us who set stories there often fall into.
Here is talking about this fascinating new but old book.
The authors
Franco Lucentini (left, 1920-2002) and Carlo Fruttero (right, 1926-2012) wrote six works of fiction together, the most popular in Italy being The Lover of No Fixed Abode,published in 1986. It has never before been available in English. In 2025 Bitter Lemon Press will be publishing Runaway Horses, their murder mystery set in Siena during the Palio, the city’s colourful annual horse-race.
Long-term resident Robin Saikia is the author of Drink and Think Venice, a unique insight into the city he’s made his home. I was lucky to stop by at his home in San Marco today for a chat about many things Venetian… including his preferred kind of spritz. Which also happens to be the name of Robin’s lovely dog.
I spent the best part of five years hopping to and from Amsterdam from 2012 onwards writing a series of books featuring Pieter Vos, a rather eccentric detective living a bohemian life in a canalboat on the Prinsengracht. Read more…
The series was my follow-on to The Killing books but came up against another Amsterdam book my UK publisher had paid a fortune for. So you can guess which one of us got all the publicity and marketing support. The Vos series in English is, however, now back in my hands and available as revised e-book and print editions exclusively on Amazon worldwide. Plus there’s an omnibus e-book edition of all four titles too. Here they are in order…
The House of Dolls, the first in the series, sees Vos out of the police, lost, struggling with the fact his daughter’s missing, presumed dead, in a mystery connected with a doll’s house in the Rijksmuseum. Then another girl vanishes in similar circumstances and Vos finds himself drawn back into the case.
In The Wrong Girl, the second in the series, Vos and his young partner Laura Bakker are drawn into the search for the daughter of an immigrant woman working the sex district, snatched by mistake by terrorists looking for the child of a government worker. Set during the arrival of Sinterklaas, a popular event that sees Amsterdam crowded with visitors.
The third book in the series, Little Sister, sees Vos and Bakker go beyond Amsterdam, into countryside around Volendam, a fishing village with a background in rock music. Two sisters, thought to have murdered a musician who abused them, have gone missing and are assumed to be a danger to the public. But perhaps they are more victims than perpetrators after all.
In the fourth book, Vos’s beloved terrier is dognapped by a mysterious figure who seems to want Vos to investigate a series of attacks on woman, crimes that are thought to have been solved. But as Vos and Bakker start to investigate mysterious happenings at the famous Albert Cuyp market they begin to realise the case everyone thought solved is far from closed.
It’s thirty years since I first entered the crazy world of authordom and there have been a good few books along the way. Inevitably, that means titles readers still want to find fall by the wayside over time. Some of my more popular titles from the past are currently unavailable due to the expiry of rights and other issues.
Well, here’s some good news. A bunch of my biggest hits from the past three decades are coming back. First, two Venice titles with new introductions in which I talk about their genesis and what they mean to me now.
Lucifer’s Shadow, first released in 2000 and later republished in the UK as The Cemetery of Secrets, was the first book I wrote set in Italy. A twin-era tale embracing the Venice of Vivaldi and Canaletto, both of whom make cameo appearances, coupled with a ‘modern’ story set in what was then the present day — the Venice of the 1990s, somewhat different to now. As I explain in the new introduction to this edition, Lucifer was an eye opener for me on many fronts and led to the long obsession I’ve had with Italy since.
Carnival for the Dead, released ten years later,is a standalone novel featuring one of the most popular characters from the Costa series, the forthright pathologist Teresa Lupo. In this solo outing Teresa finds herself in a chilly Venice during Carnival, searching for her lost aunt, Sofia, and encountering a very odd mystery: a series of linked short stories featuring her and Sofia which appear to give a clue to her aunt’s fate. If you liked The Medici Murders and The Borgia Portrait, then this tale, with its mix of mystery and history, is very much in the same vein. Again, I’ve written a new introduction about the book’s genesis.
Both Lucifer’s Shadow and Carnival for the Dead will be priced at £2.99 or equivalent in e-book. Lucifer’s Shadow is available now for pre-order with release this Thursday, September 7. The print editions, priced at £10.99 and £9.99 respectively, are ready now. The e-book of Carnival for the Dead should go live shortly.
On September 21, the four books that form my Pieter Vos series set in Amsterdam — The House of Dolls, The Wrong Girl, Little Sister and Sleep Baby Sleep — will all become available on Amazon in e-book and can be pre-ordered today. The print versions are available now. On the 21st, the entire series will appear as an e-book box set.
The Vos books are the titles I wrote directly after working on the three-book novel adaptations of The Killing TV series in Copenhagen. They’re in the same vein — dark, city-based stories, set in Amsterdam locations I took great pains to research (not that it was a pain), notably the Jordaan, with a cast of very local characters.
But that’s not all, as the shopping channels say. I’m delighted to be able to announce that Severn/Canongate, which already publishes the first three Nic Costa titles and the last, The Savage Shore, have now acquired the remaining six books in the series which will reappear with new covers and a new life in paperback and e-book next Spring. Watch this space for more details. It will be heartening to have all the Costa titles under the same English language publishing imprint worldwide for the first time.
Happily, none of this affects the audiobooks of all these titles which remain available through all the usual channels, and through the same audio publisher, WF Howes, who’ve been with me for most of the past three decades. You can get all these titles, the Venice books, Vos and the Costa series, on audio right now.
