Cormac O'Cuilleanainreviews The Monster of FlorenceBy Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi Virgin Books 332 pp, £14.99
FLORENCE WAS haunted by a serial killer who ambushed courting couples in country locations. The boy would be shot, then the girl, her dead body dragged from the car, her genitals removed with a knife. This happened seven times, between 1974 and 1985, with the same Beretta handgun used every time. One exception: two German men were murdered in a camper van; one of them had long blond hair.
The “Monster of Florence” has never been definitively identified, although more than a dozen men were arrested or charged. It’s always assumed that the Monster was male: a feeble man, too weak to hoist his female victims off the ground. Also impotent, according to the FBI.
Douglas Preston, an American thriller writer who came to Florence from Maine in 2000, rented a country house beside a peaceful olive grove, which turned out to be the scene of one of these gruesome crimes. After meeting Mario Spezi, a hyperactive Florentine journalist, Preston abandoned his plans for a historical thriller to undertake a joint book about il Mostro di Firenze. Spezi, known to his colleagues as the “monstrologist”, was obsessed with the case. He developed theories of his own, following leads the police had discounted.
Preston tells the story from the start, in classic thriller style: 60 short chapters, each with an effective twist. He buys into Spezi’s theories, embellishing them with erudite snippets of local colour, Renaissance history, dramatic dialogue, psychology, sociology and other enjoyable irrelevancies to enliven what might otherwise have been a damnably depressing tale. The reader is skilfully led into dark corners of society; Preston’s preferred suspects are a feral family of impoverished Sardinians, who left their island for Tuscany after a domestic murder back home. But he also follows other trails, documenting them in detail without losing the pace of the story.
Sometimes the police were certain they had locked up the right suspect – until the killer struck again and their prisoner had to be turned loose. Finally they lit on an eligible contender, an ancient peasant with a violent past. They put him on trial in the 1990s, along with several acquaintances, including the village idiot; these people were still appearing in interminable retrials after the original chief suspect had been acquitted on appeal and died of old age.
Preston’s book shows convincingly how the investigation of a high-profile crime can involve rivalries, vanities, fierce personal ambitions and a willingness to fabricate evidence from the flimsiest materials. Sound familiar? Still, nobody got waterboarded.
As time went by, the authorities gave credence to more and more outlandish conspiracy theories. Prominent citizens who had died in mysterious circumstances were posthumously deemed to be the Monster, or his best mates. As Preston tells it, the investigators, inspired by the revelations of a hysterical blogger, became convinced that all the murders and mutilations had been done to supply raw materials for Satanic rituals among the nobility.
In later chapters, Preston’s irritating habit of foregrounding himself and his Florentine friend pays off unexpectedly, as they both become part of the story. When Spezi rubbished some official theories, he was arrested for obstruction of justice and even accused of involvement in the Monster’s crimes, real and imaginary. Bizarrely, the Sicilian policeman who orchestrated the arrest was himself the author of a rival book on the case, slated to appear from Spezi’s Italian publisher. Preston himself was arrested by a hostile judge. These farcical developments – Gilbert Sullivan meet Jarndyce versus Jarndyce – gloriously compensate for the ghastly sameness of the crimes. The resulting book is intensely readable and sometimes moving, particularly when Preston, post-9/11, confronts the fact that evil is by its nature incomprehensible.
Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin teaches Italian at Trinity College Dublin. He writes crime novels under the pen name Cormac Millar