Alibi - Joseph Kanon

Adam Miller is a US-Army war-crimes investigator in 1946, just after the war, investigating and gathering of intelligence on the Nazi perpetrators of the horrors of the concentration camps and attempting to bring them to justice. On leave and visiting his widowed mother in Venice, he is horrified to discover that she is engaged to a distinguished Italian doctor, Gianni Maglione, suspecting – despite the advice of his mother’s friend Bertie that she in love with the man and has never been happier – that he is really after her money. Adam meets Claudia at a party, a young Jewish girl who suffered at the hands of her captors in one of the camps and when they meet Gianni, she believes she recognises the man who handed over her sick father to the occupying German forces during the war, to die in a concentration camp, or more likely since he was so ill, on the train on the way there.

Using his contacts in intelligence, Adam investigates Gianni’s background and finds some suspicious activities that reek of collaboration, but when he confronts the doctor in a heated exchange, he ends up killing him. As they are all expected at the first major ball of the season in Venice, Adam and Claudia must turn up to avoid suspicion, immediately after disposing of his body in the lagoon.  What will subsequent events turn up about both the murder and Gianni’s past?

There are a number of interesting elements in Alibi that take it a bit different from the usual murder-mystery thriller, namely the post-war setting and thus the moral ambiguity of actions committed at this time. Can a killing be morally justified if there is enough suspicion that the ‘victim’ may have collaborated with Nazis and contributed to the shipping off of Jews to concentrations camps? Or is the really reason for his murder Adam’s personal distaste for a man he thinks is marrying his mother for money? The ambiguity also surrounds Gianni’s alleged guilt. How much did he really collaborate with the Nazi’s, if at all? How different were his actions from any citizen having to get along with the occupying forces? Did he really collaborate or did his perceived actions actually cover a form of resistance? It’s hard to know. The fact that Dr. Maglione could have been killed by partisans holding grudges after the war is also to Adam’s advantage in remaining free from suspicion of his death.

This various ambiguities in the situation and the characters make Alibi much more interesting than it otherwise would be – but this is the same trick the author played with The Good German – and otherwise it is a fairly standard by-the-numbers crime thriller – an opportunistic heat-of-the-moment murder, disposal of the body and the suspense of the police investigation, Adam hoping that the alibi for the time of Gianni’s disappearance holds out. The post-war Venetian location also lends the book far more implied atmosphere and glamour than is actually described, as the book – perhaps with an eye on a future movie option (I believe Soderberg is currently filming The Good German) – is very heavily dialogue based. And the dialogue is not particularly great or revealing of the characters. Just about everyone except Adam, his mother and their friend Bertie speak in verb-less clipped, oblique sentences of Italians speaking English. There are also some really dumb elements.  Adam is called to identify the body when it is discovered rather than someone from the doctor’s own family or friends. Someone who has only known Gianni, an eminent and distinguished Venetian doctor, for about a week? Clearly it’s just there for effect. Yet this is what the book is all about – the cat and mouse chase, the baiting, the danger of making a slip-up and the danger of whole unholy mess unravelling.

If you like you can also see a parallel being drawn between the innocent American black and white distinction between right and wrong, Miller blundering in after the war is over, starting investigations and making his own moral judgements without considering the complexity of the wartime situation and the difficulty of pulling lives back together afterwards. Unfortunately Kanon doesn’t really play this one out in a way that would make the book much more interesting and relevant. In the end, all the various ambiguities are resolved and the actions justified. Standard stuff, not handled with an particular flair, but the period, situation and shifting morality of the time make it much more intriguing that it might otherwise have been.