Carte Blanche

by Carlo Lucarelli

Book Overview

April 1945, Italy. The final days of the Fascist Republic. World War II is nearing it's frantic conclusion. The regime's days are numbered, it's disgraced leaders know it, and their quibbling over pieces of the post-war pie is getting more desperate by the minute. Commissario De Luca has been handed a murder investigation that will draw him into the private lives of the rich, priviledged, and powerful. With Mussolini's house of cards ready to collapse,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 193337215X
• ISBN13: 9781933372150
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Length: 108 Pages
• Weight: 0.41 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 8.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A powerful, historical, police procedural set in the last days of WWII Italy.

American and British forces invaded Sicily in 1943 and Il Duce was voted out of power by his own Grand Council. He was arrested by the police upon leaving a meeting with King Vittorio Emanuele, who told him that the war was lost. The dictator's 20 year regime was thus officially terminated. Aided by the Germans, Mussolini escaped and was immediately taken to Germany for an audience with Hitler. There, the Fuehrer told him that unless he agreed to return home and form a new fascist state in Northern Italy, the Germans would destroy Milan, Genoa and Turin. Mussolini agreed to set up a new regime, the Italian Social Republic, which would be propped up by the German army. "Carte Blanche" is set in Northern Italy, April, 1945. WWII is about to end and the Allied forces are closing in on Milan. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, as well as hundreds of Fascist Party members and government officials, are frantically attempting to flee Italy to Switzerland. The country's entire power structure is collapsing. The author reflects this tumultuous period in his writing, "There is, above all enormous moral and political confusion that mixes together the desperation of those who know they are losing, the opportunism of those ready to change sides, the guilelessness of those who haven't understood anything, and even the desire for revenge in those who are about to arrive." Commissario De Luca has just transferred from the "Brigate Nere," the Black Brigade, to the Questura, the regular police force. The Black Brigade, the Political Police, is one of the many paramilitary and police groups operating in the Italian Social Republic. De Luca is an extremely competent policeman and investigator who considers himself to be apolitical. He never participated in any of the brutal behavior the Brigate is known for. "You don't ask a policeman to make political choices, you ask him to do his job well." Only a few days into his new job, he is assigned to investigate a brutal murder. Twenty-four year-old Rehinard Vittorio, a wealthy Italian citizen and member of the Fascist Republican Party since 1944, is found dead in his apartment, stabbed through the heart and groin. Vittorio's party membership was sponsored by Count Alberto Maria Tedesco, a member of the Republic's diplomatic corps. In other words, the victim was very well connected. Primary witnesses to the events surrounding the murder are the maid, and the porter, who called in the crime. Both are missing. The porter's wife, however, is present and willingly informs De Luca that Rehinard Vittorio received a constant stream of women visitors. On the morning of his death, two women were seen leaving his apartment at different times, a pretty blond, "but crazy as a loon," and a brunette with glasses. Unfortunately, in a political sense, the blond turns out to be Count Tedesco's daughter. The brunette is the wife of Tedesco's primary political rival. De Luca teams up with another cop, Maresciallo Pugliese, to solve t

Noir Italian Style

It is April, 1945. Mussolini's regime is in its death throes, clinging to power in the north of Italy. Chaos and anarchy is rapidly replacing repression and order as the predominant feature of Italian life. Yet there is still some semblance of law and order so when a prominent and quite unsavory member of Mussolini's Republican Party is murdered, the police are called to the scene to investigate the crime. The crime is deemed sufficiently important for the police to be granted `carte blanche', to take any means necessary to solve the murder. Commisario De Luca is assigned to lead the investigation and his investigation is the heart of Carlo Lucarelli's enjoyable short novel "Carte Blanche". "Carte Blanche", the first volume in what is known as the De Luca Trilogy, is rich in storytelling and atmosphere. As drawn by Lucarelli, De Luca is an interesting character. He is neither a hero nor an antihero. He seems to want to be nothing more than to be a detective yet as the story opens he has just transferred back to the regular police force after a stint with the secret police. He'd left because he didn't like that sort of work and seems quite willing to point out that no, he'd never tortured anyone. He is savvy enough to know that an investigation like this is one with political undercurrents that could put him in danger but his compulsion to gather facts and put together the pieces of a puzzle outweighs his sense of caution. As a result we see a story where De Luca persists in pursuing an investigation even when all his instincts tell him he is walking through a minefield. The strength of "Carte Blanche" lies primarily in Lucarelli's ability to create an atmosphere of Italy on the edge of chaos. I got a real sense of time and place while reading "Carte Blanche". Apart from De Luca, Lucarelli does not invest a lot of time in presenting us with a full-blown character analysis of the key parties to the crime and its aftermath. We also don't get a lot of the internal life of De Luca but De Luca's actions tend to speak for themselves and over the course of the book I got a nice feel for his personality without having had Lucarelli spell it out for me. At the story's end we see the threads of the investigation pulled together while the threads holding together the reigns of government come fully undone. The resolution is not so much a conclusion as it is a signal that De Luca and Italy are in for some very interesting times in the months and years to come. "Carte Blanche" was a very satisfying first volume to the De Luca Trilogy. Volume Two The Damned Season (De Luca Trilogy 2) has been republished recently and the third and final volume (Via delle Oche) is, apparently, due out soon. I've read and enjoyed Volume Two and look forward to the conclusion. Recommended. L. Fleisig

Nothing New

Here's the premise: decent man in the service of the Fascist police with the allies getting closer and closer each day. Partisans on the roofs and various militias on the streets. The atmosphere takes care of half the job already. Some hints of "Fatherland" and the whole canon of decent men in service of nasty regimes. A very short novel as well, only about a 128 pages. But a decent start and I'd probably read the rest of the trilogy as well.

The Fog of War

Within the crime genre, I find that there's something inherently interesting in stories about policemen or detectives working within nasty regimes. There's Philip Kerr's excellent "Berlin Noir" trilogy starring P.I. Bernie Gunther, partially set in Nazi Germany. There's J. Robert Janes series featuring a French detective teamed up with a Gestapo agent in Vichy France during WWII. There's Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko series, whose early books such as "Gorky Park" show the life of a Soviet cop in Moscow. And in the early '90s, Carlo Lucarelli wrote a trilogy set in the waning days of Fascist Italy, starring Commisario De Luca. In his introduction to this long-overdue translation, Lucarelli explains how an encounter with a retired policeman opened his eyes to an era when loyalties shifted with the wind, and factionalism reigned -- even among the police. The story takes place circa April 1945 in Milan, where De Luca has just been switched from one of the political police units to the civil police as the German-allied civil administration is on the brink of collapse. It opens with the discovery of the body of a wealthy Italian/German fascist of murky occupation and many connections. Things get quickly complicated, as the fascist was also quite the lothario, and De Luca's capable team has its work cut out trying to establish just who might have been in the victim's apartment around the time of the murder. Further complications come from the general atmosphere, as partisans are loose in the city getting a head start on evening the score with those working for the Il Duce's regime. Despite being very short -- really novella length -- the plot gets slightly overwhelming at times due to its complexity and the rapid pace. However readers who aren't distracted by all the smoke and mirrors will likely note the existence of a fairly substantial clue and obvious suspect. The tone and mood are pure noir stuff, as De Luca lurches around in an insomniac haze watching his back for a partisan bullet. My one major qualm with the book would be its length, it only takes about 90 minutes to read and one wishes that the publisher had proceeded with translating the entire trilogy and releasing it in a single volume rather than making us wait to see how (or if) De Luca survives the chaos.

Noir fiction: Fascist Italy

Carte Blanche is the first novel of a trilogy set in Northern Italy at the end of the Fascist era. Commisario De Luca, the hero of the trilogy, has recently transferred from the political police to the regular police, but politics continues to intrude on his investigation of the murder of a well-connected but shadowy Fascist, and De Luca becomes involved with a fortune-teller, the underworld, the falling government, and the pursuing partisans. There are echoes of The Conformist, but Lucarelli's sleep-deprived cop is more self aware than Moravia's Fascist agent, and the novel refers more to classic noir fiction than to Moravia. Carte Blanche is, in spite of its complicated plot, very short and moves very fast. Not having seen them, I'm guessing that the 2 sequels will round out the story, and that the trilogy is in effect a novel in three sections--but the vagaries of the publication of novels in translation don't allow us to see the whole story yet. What we do have in English now, thanks to Europa Editions, is a fascinating glimpse into one of Italy's most troubled eras, and into a character whose origins is suggested in Lucarelli's fascinating introduction.