A Dead Man in Trieste

Those who know me will know that I'm a sucker for shabby grandeur. Ruined mansions, abandoned towns, overgrown gardens, I love them all. I think it all started when I read The Leopard in high school, when Tancredi and Angelica wander through the shut-up rooms of the palace, which was intensely romantic. 

So imagine my delight when I discovered there is a whole city like this (thanks House Hunters International). Trieste was once the sole seaport of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a meeting place for the Balkans, Italy, German-speakers, a microcosm of Europe itself, a centre of trade and culture. But now it's part of Italy, neglected cousin of Venice, its Adriatic twin -- filled with grand buildings, but now sort of... irrelevant. (I've been amusing myself by shopping for apartments in Trieste online, and boy, you can get some real bargains.) In short, I've become slightly obsessed with Trieste.

So naturally I went hunting for books set there. My local library could only come up with two, one of which is A Dead Man In Trieste by Michael Pearce, the first of a whole series of Dead Man novels set before the outbreak of WWI and featuring polyglot English policeman Sandor Seymour. The back cover says that this novel is set in 1906, but it's actually 1909, and Trieste is a hotbed of intrigue and artistic ferment. The Futurists release their manifesto, even James Joyce ('James Juice' in the novel) makes an appearance.

A Dead Man in Trieste is a short novel, less than two hundred pages, and its mystery is not all that complicated, but I loved the setting (obviously) and this volatile corner of history and geography.