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.