Giobbe Tuama & C. - Augusto De Angelis

Promising great variety and an exploration of all sides of crime and Italian society, Augusto De Angelis' third Commissario De Vincenzi thriller, written in 1936, has different challenges for the commissioner and as such takes on a different tone from Il banchiere assassinato and Sei donne e un libro. It's in a different social milieu and, as such, he has to adapt his usual investigatory approach. De Vincenzi still prefers the psychological examination of witnesses and suspects, but rather than coming to the scene and attempting to track back to find a killer, he is very much involved in an ongoing investigation.

At first however it's a case of arriving at a crime scene and getting a sense of the environment he is working in. It's at a book fair which, as an avid reader, is not unknown to him, but the victim of strangulation found in one of the booths has an unusual background. Giobbe Tuama is of American Irish background (Giobbe is the Italian for 'Job' in the Bible), and had been murdered while there in Milan selling Bibles ("72 books in one for 10 lire!") as a member of the Evangelical League.

Tuama's background and occupation however is evidently not as innocent as it sounds. He's been acting as a loanshark for a clientele of the professional classes, as well as some of the writers at the book fair. But on the evening he was murdered he had also just encountered a man who had been looking for him for the last thirty years, a Dane called Crestansen; a man who knows his real name is Jeremiah Shanahan. That might be significant only the next day Crestansen is also discovered murdered, chloroformed and a hat pin pushed into his heart in an exclusive hotel on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele.

The case is very much a live one for De Vincenzi then, one that opens up a lot of unknowns and hints at a lot of secret identities, as well as histories that go back years and to other places far from Milan. As with previous investigations, the first thing of course for the Commissioner is to start examining witnesses and figure out who they are, how well they know Tuamas, and what they might be hiding themselves. His talent for psychological insights is complicated here however by the religious nature of his witnesses often relying on biblical quotes to justify and explain their positions, which is nonetheless a sign to De Vincenzi that they are hiding things, from themselves as much as him.

As with the first two cases, Il banchiere assassinato and Sei donne e un libro, when confronted with people unwilling to testify and little evidence to rely on, De Vincenzi has to resort to, shall we say, unconventional methods. When all the pieces that are available are there and some are lacking, he needs to trick people into confessing what they know to fill those gaps. His method then is partly investigation, partly intuition and partly scheming. The results are often unpredictable (and probably inadmissible in court), particularly - obviously without giving anything away - the victims and suspects all believe that they are doing the work of God. ‘Iddio lo ha voluto!'. God works in mysterious ways in this case to bring them all of them, with their unexpected family connections, together in Milan.

Reading notes: I read an Italian language Kindle eBook edition of Giobbe Tuama & C. by Augusto De Angelis published by‎ Scrivere. I believe that Giobbe Tuama & C. is actually the fourth book in the Commissario De Vincenzi series, so I'll have to add the third book Il canotto insanguinato to my reading list. In fact, since you can buy the complete out of copyright works of Augusto De Angelis on Kindle download for 99p, I've just ordered that. If I am highly unlikely to have the time to read everything, I suspect that I might at least want to read a few more books in this formative Italian crime series.