A death in Florence

Press, 30 April 1988, Page 24

A death in Florence

A Rich Full Death. By Michael Dibdin. Jonathan Cape, 1987. 204 pp. $32.95. (Reviewed by Joan Curry)

I have to be careful not to give anything away here. This is one of those occasions when to be too descriptive in a review would be to spoil the surprise. The book purports to be a series of letters from a Robert Booth, an American from Boston, on an extended visit to Florence. He manages to wangle an introduction to Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who live in a ratified atmosphere of social and literary distinction in a murky old villa there.

An old love of Robert Booth’s is found hanged in a tree. Robert

Browning as a most unlikely sleuth unaccountably concerns himself in the mystery of the death and leads Robert Booth all over Florence in the course of his investigations. And it is al) done in a solemn and stately pastiche of nineteenth-century mystery story writers, plus more than a dash of Dante.

Anyone with a taste for Wilkie Collins, or Conan Doyle, or Edgar Allan Poe, will relish the leisured, expansive style of this book. You can practically smell the stonework of old Florence dripping with atmosphere, hear the footsteps in the sinister darkness, and see the villains twirling their moustachios. All you have to decide is who the villain is, or whether you have been the victim of an elaborate practical joke.