E C R Lorac - Murder on a Monument

I need to start with my standard disclaimer for some of the Loracs: Murder on a Monument is not readily available, and I apologise in advance if you read this review, decide you want to read it yourself, and can’t get hold of a copy.  That said (spoilers) I wasn’t too struck with this one.

The story begins promisingly enough - siblings Nick and Jonet Airdrey are on their way into Rome on the bus from Ciampino Airport. We get some of the background quite early on – Jonet is 8 years older and worried about Nick but trying to be fairly ‘hands off’ as she’s convinced his overbearing uncle (they’re orphans) and horrible school are the reasons he’s a bit of a nervous case and got in with some dodgy friends who may or may not have fleeced him of his inheritance (i.e. did the business legitimately go bust, or did they take his capital under false pretences?).

Also on the bus with the Airdrey’s are an elderly lady and her niece, a couple of English businessmen who identify Jonet as secretary to a powerful business magnate and consider how they can somehow fall in with her for business reasons never fully explained, an American who may or may not be doing the same, a pair of missionaries and an Irishman who does so little up to the point he’s coshed and killed I genuinely forgot he’d ever existed.

Jonet and Nick find his body - next morning - on the simply enormous Vittorio Emanuele monument, a place Nick was recommending back on the bus not for its own sake but because you can see all Rome spread out before you from the top. Unfortunately as the brother and sister have taken different sets of steps up, not quite playing hide and seek but almost, Jonet cannot give her brother an alibi.

Add that to the fact the murdered man is identified as someone from that dodgy business he put money into, and that he’s so desperate to get away he tells a rather silly lie to he police, it all starts to look bad for Nick. Enter Jonet’s boss’s security officer (Belloni), who points out to police that there were other people around at the time, including one who left sharpish when the body was found. If Nick is a suspicious character, then so it he. 

At this point I had to look the Vittorio Emanuele monument up to work out how feasible the whole set up was. Despite having been to Rome at least three times, and the fact it’s not a thing anyone can feasibly not have noticed, it doesn’t seem to have made much impression on me. 

Frankly, having identified it, I don't mind the thing, but I can understand Lorac’s distaste for it (Nick’s verdict is that it’s a good thing to walk up to get a view of Rome, but not to actually look at, and the authorial voice clearly agrees) it's big and bombastic and neo-classical - which seems odd in a city with so many truly ancient things. 

Anyway, back to the story – Nick is arrested and Jonet is terribly worried, and so her employers involve not only Belloni but MacDonald, who is actually in Rome investigating a drug smuggling business, which of course it turns out might possibly be connected…

So the ingredients are good, but somehow it never came together for me. My first issue was with the endless slew of street names and place names we don’t really need to know, as if the book was written with one eye on a map of Rome. I felt a competent editor should have toned that down.

Then there’s Jonet. A minor quibble was that the name gave me problems - my eye kept catching on it as a typo for Janet or Jonette. A larger one is her internal monologue about Nick - although her thoughts make perfect sense they feel strangely superficial and lacking in emotion. There’s no anger at the overbearing uncle or the people who took advantage of her brother, no desire to protect him that is having to be resisted, no irritation with him she's having to tamp down. It seems unnatural.   

I was also a bit disbelieving that literally none of the Brits and Americans in the story feel any inclination to co-operate or tell the truth to the police.  This may have been an accurate reflection of the time for some people (another hangover from a war only 13 years in the past?), but surely not every single normally law-abiding person would take this attitude? 

No wonder the police are happy to have MacDonald and Belloni unofficially on board.  Off they dash on a jolly up into the Roman hills (which I recommend btw. The hills around Rome are lovely) to try and break some alibis, spilling out more place names as they go… and I was left wondering why MacDonald was there. He doesn’t really seem to do much Belloni couldn’t do by himself.

So one only for the completists I think. As I said at the beginning it’s not at all easy to get hold of (I used the British Library again).