Back to Bologna - Michael Dibdin

Back to Bologna - Michael Dibdin

Michael Dibdin has become one of my favorite authors. Unfortunately he is dead. Fortunately he wrote a number of books. This one has an entertaining and slightly convoluted plot. What follows is me exercising my memory to see if I could remember how it all fit together. To that end it is all spoilers, all the time.

What do we have here? A comedy of errors, perhaps? We have
- a college student and his refugee girlfriend,
- a spoiled rich kid and his gang of thuggish soccer fans,
- a caricature of a private investigator,
- a celebrity chef and his publicist,
- an aging senior police officer and his common law wife,
- a pompous windbag of a professor, and
- the dead owner of a soccer team (aka football club).
The rich kid and the college student are roommates. The college student out of financial necessity, the rich kid because of a whim. The detective is hired by the rich kids parents to follow rich kid around and see what he is doing. The rich kid mugs the detective and steals his gun, which he hides behind some of his roommate's books in his apartment.
    The professor kicks the student out of school because he is too smart for his own good. The student packs up his books to sell before returning home and discovers the gun. He follows the professor home intending to destroy some bit of foolish public sculpture the professor has set up next to his house. He shoots the gun at the sculpture, the bullet ricochets and hits the professor in the butt.
    Senior police officer stops by rich kid's parent's house to talk to them, because rich kid has been bragging about killing the owner of the soccer team. The police don't really suspect him because the same gun was used to shoot the professor and the team owner had lots of enemies, so a loud mouth kid doesn't really fit their profile of the killer. The kid comes home while senior police officer is there and has an argument with the housekeeper.
    The celebrity chef has had a disastrous public appearance and goes out slumming, incognito, looking for drugs to alleviate his misery. He runs into college student who is down in the dumps now that he has not only been kicked out of school, but the police are probably looking for him. The student feigning drunkenness, falls into Mr. Chef, relieves him of his wallet and replaces it with the pistol. The chef, failing to score any drugs freaks out and decides to alter his appearance by getting his head shaved, whereupon he discovers his wallet it missing. Suddenly finding himself in desperate circumstances he takes a job as a cook at an Italian restaurant where is confined to the kitchen with a 90 year old grandmother who screeches orders incessantly.
    Coincidentally, our senior police officer is having dinner at this same restaurant with one of the local cops, and likewise, college student is also there having dinner with his girlfriend. College student has brought a bag of rich kid's clothes because rich kid believes he needs to lie low for a while due to the perceived heat on him.
    Celebrity chef is enlisted to help serve a large group celebrating a little girl's birthday. Talking to the birthday girl prompts him to break into song, which is apparently his one real talent, which gets a big round of applause from the patrons. Heading back to the kitchen he is threatened by rich kid throwing plates of food in his direction. Taking the pistol from his pocket, he walks rich kid out the front door where he stumbles. Rich kid takes advantage of the situation and grabs the gun, and so when the cops show up two minutes later they find the killer holding the murder weapon.
    Celebrity chef's career is going down in flames thanks to the earlier debacle, until his long suffering publicist uses the impromptu concert to give it a huge boost.
    Our incompetent private detective attempts to claim a reward for information leading to the arrest of the soccer team owner's killer, but the police detain him because he had his name engraved on the gun.

    The women is this story also have important roles to play, but they are embellishments, i.e. they don't get to actually handle the gun.
    Not knowing much about this author, or any others for that matter, I was a little confused by the author's description of the professor. I couldn't figure out whether he was describing himself or some other famous dude. One reviewer claimed it was Umberto Eco.
    The title can be taken as a phrase, as in I'm going "back to Bologna", which is where the story is set, or as the 'title' one would find on a volume of an encyclopedia, i.e. entries from 'Back' to 'Bologna', kind of like 'Happy to Hug'.

April 2016 added Amazon link.

Portland Eastside Ramble

Drove over to Portland's East side yesterday afternoon. First thing I noticed was this brand new fortress over by the airport:

FBI Portland Office

I swear it wasn't there last week. According to Google Earth, it's still not there.

First stop was IKEA, then Verizon, who directed us to Tech R Us for cell-phone repair. Smart phone glass replacement is going to take an hour, so we head over to Bearly Read Books. Okay, now we are heading into unexplored territiory. I have only been east of 205 maybe a half dozen times since we moved to Oregon. It's like a whole 'nother planet. Where downtown Portland is a tangled snarl of roads and bridges, the east side is a nice, flat, gird of asphalt streets. It was like being in foreign country.

Glendoveer Golf Course

On the way there we drive by Glendoveer Golf Course which looks like some kind of primeval fantasy land. Lush fields of green grass, which is what you expect on a golf course, but there was a also a forest of enormous trees. I've never seen anything like it.
    I did not see any golfers. Saw a few people with what looked like soccer balls. Evidently footgolf is now a thing.

Bearly Read Books

The place is totally crammed with books, almost all paperbacks. Aisles that in real stores lead to cross aisles that lead to more aisles are closed off here to provide more shelf space. The place is full of tiny little cul-de-sacs, each one devoted to a particular genre. Romance novels occupy an aisle that follows the walls and completely encircles everything else. Not surprising since they are the most read books in the world. Reminds me of the South American drug lord who was totally enamored of the Harlequin romances written by Joan Wilder in Romancing the Stone.

The high point has to be the Janet Evanovich Altar. I really like Janet's books. I've read a couple and they are great fun. I didn't realize that she had a cult following in East Portland.

I picked up half a couple of books:

• Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
• The Burglar on the Prowl by Lawrence Block
• Vendetta by Michael Dibdin
• The Fifth Floor by Michael Harvey

I've read books by Block and Dibdin before, they're pretty great. Dostoevsky and Harvey, well, we'll just have to wait and see.

Portland Eastside Ramble

Heading home, I thought I would just follow Glisan (pronounced Gleason) Street west and see where it got me. After we had been driving for a while my wife noticed that we were driving by Providence Hospital, an East side Landmark that we visit annually. I was surprised, and then surprised that I was surprised because I knew Providence backed onto Glisan.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (A Harry Palmer Novel) by Len Deighton

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (A Harry Palmer Novel) by Len Deighton

Stopped by Barnes & Noble the other day so I'm looking for something to read. I looked over the new Science Fiction section but it seemed to be all swords and sorcery. If there was any hard science fiction in there I didn't see it. So I headed over to Mystery / Thrillers. No Jo Nesbo, and no Michael Dibdin. Okay, I didn't remember Michael's last name exactly, but I knew some of the letters and I didn't find anything. And the I saw this book by Len Deighton and for some reason that name rang a bell. Seems I've read a couple of his books - The Ipcress File and Berlin Game. Don't often buy new books from bookstores. I think this is the second one this year. It's one of the perks of having paid off the mortgage - I can indulge in penny ante whims.

Dornier DO 28 Skyservant

The book starts off with a rendezvous in the middle of the Sahara desert. Business completed, they are picked up by a Dornier DO 28 Skyservant.

Coincidences / Connections

Florida Keys

Portions of the book Cuba Straits take place in Key West, which is in the Florida Keys. We've started watching the Netflix TV series Bloodline, which is set on Islamorada, in the Florida Keys. We're in Season 1. In episode 5, Sissy Spacek (the mom) tells her son a story about his father, now deceased. When pop was a boy he lived in rural Texas. He comes home one day and finds that his father has beaten his mother and locked her in the basement.

Mademoiselle Blanche Monnier
Locked in her room by her mother when she was 25.

     I just finished Vendetta by Michael Dibdin, a murder mystery set in Sardinia, which is an Italian island in the Mediterranean. Seems to have many of same features as Sicily: vicious, ignorant peasants, stuck in 16th Century. Turns out the killer, and our hero's savior, is a diminutive woman who got locked in her parents basement when she was 15. Elsewhere in the book he mentions Catullus, an ancient Roman poet.

Gaius Valerius Catullus

    The Fifth Floor starts off with the hero quoting Catullus. Chain, chain, chain . . .

Books

Recent reading material. I've read the books in the left and center column. I haven't finished reading the books in the right hand column. Some of them I might finish, some of them I won't.
Last fall I was driving some people to classes in Portland once a week. Since I was going all that way, and since Powell's Bookstore was right next door, I stopped in to see if I could find something interesting to read, and every week I found a Science Fiction novel that looked promising, but most of them didn't pan out.
    So I had this stack of six or eight Sci-Fi stories that I ought to read, but they just weren't compelling, and so they sat there, and I surfed the net and I didn't read much of anything.
    Eventually my mental log jam collapsed and I ordered some new stuff from Amazon and suddenly it's like springtime! Life is good once again. I just finished reading Broken Harbor by Tana French and End Games by Michael Dibdin. They are murder mysteries, not Sci-Fi, but excellent stories, and that's the important part.

April 2016 added Amazon links.

Cosi Fan Tutti

Cosi Fan Tutti by Michael Dibdin is a murder mystery with a touch of comedy. It's pretty entertaining. Then I stumble over this little aside about police stations. Kind of interesting, I thought.

Copied and pasted from Google Books. The "Southerners" he is talking about are people who live in Southern Italy.

April 2016 added Amazon link.