Customer Reviews

A Dead Man in Trieste

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Michael Pearce is a man with vast and impressive knowledge of early 20th century history. Trieste, big port in northern Italy was the only connection that diminishing Austro-Hungarian Empire had with the Adriatic sea. It is no surprise that every power in 1910 wanted the piece of action. Mr. Pearce mixes numerous Balkan nations and Germans and Austrians and, of course Italians in this swift, authentic and surprisingly light historical novel. His leading character British policeman of mixed Polish and Hungarian heritage, Sandor Seymore is a perceptive and likeable hero. I am an American citizen of Serbian nationality, so this book was dear to my heart for its respectful and expert approach to this complicated time in history.

This book provides a fascinating view of Trieste and some of it's inhabitants in a time leading up to WW1. As with Pearce's series set in Egypt in the same time frame, it helps to know background and the way the British government operated at the beginning of the 20th century.
Pearce has a very dry sense of humor which some people may find off putting but how else to highlight the difference between the British Establishment's haughty world views when living and working among the inhabitants of a differnt world?

The first in a series featuring Sandor Seymour, an agent of the British Special Branch with a talent for languages, this slim work leaves a great deal to be desired. Most mystery series rise and fall on their detective, unfortunately Seymour barely makes a blip on the radar in his debut outing. We are given snippets of his East End immigrant background, and we are told he's generally so hard at work that he doesn't have time for the ladies, and he's got a knack for languages. By the end of the book we learn that he's a fair man, and got a fairly sharp mind ("for a policeman"), but that's about it... He's one of the flattest, least-developed fictional detectives I've come across!

Alas, the story that he's tossed into isn't so great either. Trieste in 1910 (it's not clear why the promo copy says 1906, it's clearly 1910) makes an excellent backdrop for fiction, one of the foremost ports in the world, it's brimming with intrigue and scoundrels from all over Europe. Pearce gives glimpses of this here and there of plazas, the canal, old coffeehouses (mostly telling, rather than showing), but it all feels as false as a painted set. There's no depth, no aura created, just a basic canvas backdrop for Seymour to operate against. His assignment is to try and find out what's happened to the British Counsel, who's gone missing. (It's not particularly convincing that some policeman would be plucked from Special Branch to investigate this just because he can get by in a few languages, the Foreign Office would have plenty of their own fluent people who would be more adept at navigating the perils of such as place.)

In any event, Seymour shows up and starts poking around. As he discovers, the city is a hotbed of high feelings, from the officious rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to the passionate Italians who want the city back, to the various Serbs, Bosnians, and Herzegovinans who have their own agendas. The counsel's disappearance is linked to all this, and over the course of the story, Seymour pieces it altogether in plodding fashion. The prose limps along weakly without any style whatsoever, and anachronistic phrases jarringly appear in descriptions of Seymour's thoughts. This is writing at its most basic, which is a shame, 'cause the basic premise of a detective running around the major cities of pre-WWI Europe is a good one. I'm fairly big fan of historically set mysteries, so I'm hoping Pearce decides to actually give Seymour some depth for his next outing (Istanbul). in the meantime, this book is best avoided unless one has some kind of keen interest in Trieste or Futurism (see below).

The one somewhat interesting element in the book is that Seymour becomes friends with a bunch of artists hanging about the plazas of Trieste. These include James Joyce (for some reason "Juice" in the story), Italo Svevo (who is called by his true first name: Ettore), and the founder of the Futurist movement, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Indeed, the climax of the novel takes place at the very first "Futurist Evening", which was a real-life event orchestrated by Marinetti. The futurists come across as a zany, madcap, fun-loving, bunch of boozehounds in the book. What readers might not know is that Futurism was hugely influential in the development of Italian fascism, and that Marinetti was a Milanese millionaire who would go on to become a supporter of the Italian invasion of Libya, an intimate of Mussolini, and Secretary of the Fascists Writers Union!