S-Z
Sager, Gordon The rape of Europa: A Venetian fantasy
St Aubin de Terán, Lisa The Palace
Salisbury, C. Dark inheritance
Sallis, Susan Four Weeks in Venice
Sand, George Consuelo: A Romance of Venice
The Mosaic Workers
Leone Leoni
Sanders, Madelyn Under Venice Harlequin
Sarasin, J.G. Eighth wonder
Schiller, Friedrich von The man who sees ghosts
Schnitzler, Arthur Casanova's homecoming
(a.k.a. Casanova's Return to Venice)
Scott, J.M. Touch of the nettle
Sedgwick, Marcus The Kiss of Death
Seth, Vikram An equal music
Simenon, Georges The Venice train
Sklepowich, Edward Death in a serene city
Farewell to the flesh
Liquid desires
Black bridge
Death in the Palazzo
Deadly to the sight  
The last gondola  2003
Frail Barrier 2008
The Veils of Venice 5.2009
Smith, Catherine Barozzi, or the Venetian sorceress
Smith, Kay Nolte Venetian song
Sollers, Philippe Watteau in Venice
Spark, Muriel Territorial rights
Spender, Stephen Engaged in writing
Sterling, Thomas Evil of the day
Stewart, Sally The enchanter's wand
Strutton, Bill Glut of virgins
Symons, Julian The criminal comedy of the contented couple

Taylor, Don Daughters of Venice Radio play
Thomson, D.H. Hello, my love
Thorne, Anthony Young man on a dolphin
Tiffany, Grace The turquoise ring
Timperley, Rosemary Cat-walk
Walk to San Michele
Tournier, Michel Gemini
Turk, Frances Lamp from Murano
Turnbull,  Mrs. Lawrence The Golden Book of Venice download
Unsworth, Barry Stone Virgin
Vickers, Salley Miss Garnet's angel

Walker, Kathryn A Stopover in Venice
Wallace, Irving Pigeon project
Weisgall, Deborah The World Before Her
Wentworth, Sally The hawk of Venice romance
Wheatley, Dennis The rape of Venice
Whittington, Mark & Chantal Nocturne
Whitson, Denton For the glory of Venice
Whyte, Christopher The cloud machinery
Wiles, John  Killing Casanova
Williams, Jim Scherzo
Wilson, Andrew The lying tongue
Wilson, Barbara The Case of the orphaned bassoonists
Winterson, Jeanette The passion
Wright, Daphne Never such innocence
Zschokke, Heinrich Bravo of Venice

Sarah Caudwell Thus Was Adonis Murdered
Now here's an odd one. The plot concerns a group of friends working for the same London law firm and one of their number going to Venice for a holiday and getting mixed up in a murder. The circumstances unfold in a sequence of very long letters sent by the traveller and read by the rest of them. So far so strange, but added to this is the style of the writing - florid and witty in a way that might remind you of P.G. Wodehouse or even Oscar Wilde. This comes across as a little over-ripe and obtuse at first, but soon settles into an entertaining and smooth groove. The somewhat unmodern style contrasts quite winningly with a story involving sexuality of various flavours, even if none of it is ever explicit. An easy and entertaining read, not overly heavy on the Venetian detail, but there's enough and it's fine and the plotting is pleasingly twisty. Two mistakes, though, both on page 67. Firstly Dorsodouro is not spelt like that. Secondly the contention that every church in Venice contains two Bellinis and a Giorgione is made humorously, but (given the extreme rarity of works by Giorgione and complete lack of his works in churches)  could've been funnier for us pedants if a pair of more truly ubiquitous artists were named.

 

Marina Fiorato The Glassblower of Murano
Recently-dumped Nora decides to leave London for Venice and to there become Leonora, reclaiming her colourful Venetian descent, learning the craft of glassblower and discovering more about her famous forefather, himself a master glassblower with a story. The story of Leonora's experiences in modern-day Venice plays out at the same time as we learn of her ancestor's tragic story in 17th Century Venice - and it's been, oh, weeks since we've had one of these past/present shadowing jobs. The historical fiction being set in the 17th Century is unusual - we're more used to a renaissance or 18th Century setting lately - and the glassblowing milieu is quite fresh narrative ground too. Also it makes a change to read a Venice novel this year (2008) that's not about Vivaldi and/or music, although this one does have the Pieta as a strong plot presence. The modern story, though, is very much a wish-fulfilment story for women. Sorry if you think I'm being sexist or compartmentalising, but if I tell you that our heroine gets roped into a glammy advertising campaign for the glassworks she works for because she looks so lovely, like Boticelli's Primavera, and that her colleagues consequently all hate her, and then she becomes pregnant, even though her London relationship had failed because of her barrenness...well, forgive me. Venice is well painted and well loved though, even if there are a couple of annoying mistakes, like Leonora dining out in Piazza San Barnaba - come on, we all know there's only one piazza in Venice.

Ian Fleming Risico
This is a short story found in For your eyes only and it features Venice only very briefly, with a bare few paragraphs, and one good joke. Then it's off to Alberoni on the Lido which gets the benefit of more plot and description and a leftover land-mine accident. If you've only ever seen Bond films, like me, then this is a good place to sample and start and be surprised at how good a writer Fleming is.

Mark Frutkin The Lion of Venice
Marco Polo has had less written about him, fewer novels certainly, than some other sons of Venice we could mention, so we welcome with open pages this well-written fictionalised account of Marco's first journey East. There's an assassin following and a guardian lion who appears in dreams. The hallucinatory nature of many episodes adds some fresh flavour to the writing. As a fan of leaner writing I found this a little overdone at times, but the easy flow of the writing and the plot makes me feel quibblesome for even mentioning this. There are some mighty memorable scenes, odd occurrences and telling resonances too. The Venice content begins and ends the book, with Marco's life-before and the aftermath of the long journey, but the evocation is colourful and authentic, especially at the end, as the returning Marco experiences the full impact and beauty of his home city after being so long away. An uncommonly good  read.

Cornelia Funke The Thief Lord
This is a children's book, but an unusually absorbing and well-illustrated one.  Ms Funke started out as a children's book illustrator - that's one of her chapter headings below, and you'll find a well-head by her elsewhere on this page.  When a detective working in Venice is asked to track down two missing children he little realises how much trouble this one case will cause for him and his tortoises. The kids are currently living in a disused cinema with a bunch of lovable urchins surviving by stealing and scavenging. Their leader, the Thief Lord, is not who he seems - now how unusual is that in novels set in Venice! - and the big job that's going to make their fortune soon turns strange and dangerous. The underlying theme of the adult vs. the child is well played out, and is even explored in the magical developments later. And magical is, for once, a word that can safely and truthfully be used to describe this book. 
There is also a film.

Robert Girardi Vaporetto 13
Everything has its dark side - life, the moon, the Force and Venice. This book starts unpromisingly, with a cat being put down and with an arid financial fixation usually only found in books with embossed covers. But the shiny heartlessness of our hero's life is, of course, about to get tarnished by contact with the dark and attractive decay and destitution of Venice, and a domino-clad woman who shares these qualities. The author rather overplays the putrescence, in my opinion, and conjures up a somewhat too dark & corruption-riddled city. This is closer to Stephen King than Barry Unsworth and as such is a fairly gripping read if approached with low expectations.
A film of this is currently (early 2007) in production.

William Goldman  (as S. Morgenstern)
The silent gondoliers
A slim volume from the author of The Princess Bride containing a short fable, much white space, and many illustrations. It's the story of a gondolier with a gooney smile and his struggle for acceptance by his peers - despite having a singing voice that encourages his pelting with old fish - with lots of  secret gondolier lore that is so mysterious and impressive that it must be made up. These include the reason why gondoliers don't sing anymore, despite having such fine voices that Caruso shunned Venice forever after hearing them, and revelations about the secret gondolier hangout and the site of the trickiest turn, used to test all graduating gondoliers. It won't take up much of your life to read this book, but it may well lodge in your memory, especially if you have a fascination for, or indeed a thing about, gondoliers.

L.P. Hartley Simonetta Perkins
If I tell you that this one tells of a spunky American heiress travelling through Europe with her Mother avoiding the husbands planned for her you might be reminded of works by Henry James and Edith Wharton, and so you'd be half way to knowing how this was going to go. The author, best known for The Go-Between, puts his heroine into a version of the romance he had with a handsome gondolier, much the same hetero/homo switch as  his near-contemporary E. M. Forster makes in his Italian novels. It's a novel of thoughts rather than actions and so slips by with small bright glimpses of Venice from the gondola and long lingering paragraphs spent in the heroine's head as she worries over her fate and character. But it's witty and believable, despite the rarefied air, and enjoyable. Recently republished by Hesperus Press, publishers of  short lost classics in tasteful editions with interesting introductions by people you've probably heard of.

David Hewson The lizard's bite
The story here begins with murder in a Murano glass foundry, like the last Donna Leon, but this one is very different - it's harsher and more gruesome in its details, in contrast to Ms Leon's recent lack of any real deaths. Other differences include the fact that Hewson's detectives, Nic Costa and Gianni Peroni, are not the charismatic and eccentric characters here, they are his deputies. (Presumably these names were chosen to subliminally suggest the characters when you buy a coffee or a beer.) Also they're helped by their respective girlfriends, who are ex-FBI and a pathologist, and so do not live in a state of domestic bliss. Nic Costa's ex-FBI girlfriend is introduced in a somewhat leeringly sexy way early on, but she soon confounds our doubts with regard to Hewson's sexism by becoming one of the strongest and more well-defined characters. There's art-crime, corruption, and inter-departmental wrangling as we'd expect, all wrapped in an unexpectedly toothsome plot and some good writing. The other books in this series are set in Rome, but here Venice crumbles and shines as you'd expect with the wrought-iron strangeness of the glass-makers' palazzo HQ adding architectural interest. The somewhat convenient random-violence ending of the plot bugged me a bit, but the subsequent winding up of the various emotional turmoils of the main characters was convincing and impressive. Superior stuff.





Patricia Highsmith The rat of Venice
(in The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder)
A short story about the rats of Venice, and about how one hard-done-by rat exacts his revenge. A nasty tale that doesn't anthropomorphise and so has a ring of truth to life(!) It is nonetheless slight, albeit with a strong smell of Venetian canals to it.

Susan Hill The Man in the Picture
For quite a while this small book seems as if it's never going to visit Venice, but it does eventually, twice. It's all about a painting of Venice, a scene of the carnival, which acquires the faces of people whose lives it curses. It's a suitably macabre tale, well told but without much of the descriptive detail one might crave, or the gothic excesses one might dread and love guiltily. It's a very readable mix of Henry James with M.R. James which easily holds the attention, but for me it lacked shocks and texture. 

Mary Hoffman Stravaganza - City of Masks
Having read one novel set in an imaginary Venice (by Tanith Lee below) of course another one appears within mere days. This one's by an author of books for teenagers, which is what this seems to be. I say 'seems to be' because it's more grown-up in its attitudes to sex and death than books I would've read in my teens and, like the works of Philip Pullman, is more emotionally engaging and moving than most books for adults. The fictional Venice here is called Bellezza, gondoliers are mandoliers, silver is more precious than gold (which means the mosaic domes in the Basilica are silver-coloured in Bellezza) and the doge is female. This Duchessa is about to take part in Bellezza's ceremony of the city's marriage to the sea as the book opens. This involves her being lowered into the lagoon until it reaches her, umm, marriage parts.  Into this alterno-Venice is dropped Lucien, a boy from present-day England who is weak and recovering from chemo treatment for cancer. He is transported to 16th Century Belezza if he falls asleep clutching an old notebook made in Venice and found on a skip. His adventures in Belezza take in elements of the thriller and the romance, with a fair amount of magic and alchemy. (William Dethridge, a mysterious Elizabethan mystic  in the Dr Dee mould plays an important part, and talks in an amusynge olde Englishe waye.) Murders are planned, and perpetrated, relationships grow, and the plot whips us thrillerishly to a truly moving conclusion. I loved this book.

There was a sequel called City of Stars, set in Siena, and a third instalment called City of Flowers  which was set in an alternative Florence, which is reviewed over on my Florence page.

See www.stravaganza.co.uk for more info and other stuff to read and play with. 

Henry James Travelling companions
A young man spots a young woman enraptured in front of Leonardo's Last Supper in Milan. She's an American 'doing' Europe with her father and the three get to talking and meeting up again later in Venice, where things develop. Not a slushy romance, of course, but also not the dense style of later HJ, although there is much ambiguity and subtlety of emotion. It's a bookish young man's story of an early, gentle infatuation. It was written on James's return to America after his first visit to Italy and so the early fierce infatuation with Italy is very evident too. Lot's of love of Leonardo and Tintoretto and Venice as dusk falls. There's period detail in the fact that on a visit to Padua they have to rustle up a boy with a key to see the Giottos - a bit different from booking a time-slot to shuffle in a queue through the climate-controlled airlocks. And Veronese's not quite so fashionable now. A good and accessible intro to Henry James and his Italy. And a fine companion to the later and more well-known...
The Aspern papers
The story of an obsessed biographer's siege laid to an old woman and her elderly niece in the hope of getting his hands on the old woman's papers, she having once been the muse of the fictional famous poet Jeffrey Aspern. The women live like hermits in their gloomy and unloved Venetian palazzo and so the biographer becomes their lodger and worms his way into their Miss Haversham-like dusty seclusion. The story is based on a true one, although the city was Florence and the poet was Byron. The writing style is more mature and more mannered, and matches the pompous obsession of the narrator. The Venice evoked is a fair bit darker too, with most excursions made at night, and in gondolas with the felze cabin on, but no less seductive. A classic of the fictional Venice.




 

Donna Leon

Toni Sepeda Brunetti's Venice
This is a handy-looking little book, nicely presented and with good maps. It takes the form of twelve walks through Brunetti's life as presented by the novels, with much use made of lengthy quotes, which points up Donna Leon's obvious sanction of the project. Toni Sepeda, who gives Brunetti tours, obviously knows her stuff and needs us to know it. After a while the waffley and self-important tone began to grate on me, I must admit. I'd suggest the book's use to help find locations rather than as a cover-to-cover read or as a guide to take on your travels. But the novels are anyway rare in their avoidance of location invention and other such liberty-taking.

Michelle Lovric

Donna Jo Napoli Daughter of Venice
Donata is one of the daughters of one of Venice's richest families so she wants for nothing. Except knowledge. The torment of a girl with an enquiring mind who isn't expected to need an education, and who isn't even allowed to explore the city she loves, is convincingly evoked.  She takes to the streets dressed as a boy and her horizons broaden swiftly. The street life of 16th Century Venice is new to her, and fascinatingly daunting. We learn as she does, and if sometimes this knowledge seems a little false in the convenience of its telling, it's always interesting, to her and us. That noble families in renaissance Venice could only afford for one daughter to marry, and that her sisters would be condemned to maiden-aunthood or a convent, is a sadly convincing piece of knowledge. That only one son was also allowed to marry, so as not to confuse the line of descent, is more surprising. Donata's story is emotionally involving too, as she takes her destiny in hand, and falls in love with a man who thinks that she's a boy. That her adventures take her first to the Ghetto is not unusual in recent Venice-set fiction, but she learns and feels fresh things here too. And, like the best novels set in Venice published in 2002/3, this was written for older children - see also Stravaganza and The Thief Lord.

Elle Newmark
The Book of Unholy Mischief
Luciano is a street urchin living in Venice at the end of the 15th Century. Having been raised in a brothel and on the streets, his life changes when he's taken back to the Doge's Palace by a chef in need of an assistant. His skulking abilities lead to his witnessing the Doge poisoning a malodorous peasant who he'd mysteriously invited to dinner, and more murders follow. It's all somehow linked with a mysterious book that everyone wants and the chef has his secrets too, it seems. This is another of those books where the action takes place in a Venice whose locations are barely named and rarely described. Liberties are taken with places and names, but the flavours and smells are strong and satisfying. The author plays fast-and-loose with history too, but still pulls the whole thing off. It's a young boy's story, but it's not a book for children, or even 'young adults', because it's less of an adventure and more a book about our desires, in the broad sense, and how they are sometimes misguided. But before I get too lit-crit, I should also point out that the action involves lots of food and cooking, and quite a few cats. An enjoyable, sensual and well-written first novel, then, with only the liberties taken with Venetian topography and history to quibble about.

Iain Pears The Titian Committee
He wrote the excellent An Instance of the Fingerpost, and he's also the author of five novels of  the art-crime adventures of art dealer Jonathan Argyll and Flavia di Stefano of Rome's Art Theft Squad. (The series begins with The Raphael Affair )  Their quirky hot/cold relationship is par for the course, but the wit and quality of the writing isn't. Here they investigate instances of cash-for-attributions and messy murder amongst the members of a group of art historians gathered to study the works of Titian. The crimes echo the art in a pleasing way, rather than just using paintings as a tasteful back drop. Venice, and its canals' risings and flowings, is much more than just a pretty setting here too. 
 

Barbara Quick Vivaldi’s Virgins
This is the tale told by violinist Anna Maria of her early life at the Ospedale della Pietà and of the training that leads to her becoming one of the most accomplished musicians from the famous orphanage. Vivaldi's links to the Pietà, and his writing of music especially to test and stretch the performers, has become part of the mythology of the place and the composer. The author here takes this story, and the fresh research into the women of the pieta by Mickey White, and fleshes it out into a novel that stays true to the facts, but also adds a bit of spicy conjecture and imagination. The writing is sharp and spicy too, and the Venetian detailing and atmosphere are faultless. The story is a bit usual in it's dealing with a girl's coming of age in a cloistered environment, and discovering who your friends are. But she is also discovering who her mother is, and discovering Venice in infrequently taken, and frequently punished-for, trips to palazzos and the ghetto and the like. Vivaldi is convincingly painted, and we get to meet Scarlatti, Handel, and Tiepolo too. The characters, famous and not, live and breath effortlessly, though, and the reader is never less than enthralled and convinced.
The author's website has some fascinating background material.
The image to the right is the symbol branded onto girls left at the Pieta.

Christi Phillips The Rossetti letter 
Here the tale of a courtesan involved in the Spanish Conspiracy is alternated with the story of a just-dumped postgrad student who is writing her dissertation on said courtesan and conspiracy, and who has come to Venice to attend a conference and meet the person who is rumoured to be writing a thunder-stealing book on the same subject. The 17th Century story is well told and the period detail and atmosphere is most impressive and sensual. No problems there. And even the modern story is well-written and full of likeable and convincing characters. It's just that it reads too much like a slushy romantic novel at times, for this romance-a-phobic chap anyway. There's just a little too much about getting the right frock and shoes, and all that does he/doesn't he stuff for me.  But having said that the simple conclusions of romantic fiction are not resorted to and the relationships are not unreal. I recommend this for you soppy girlies out there, then, but advise chaps to be prepared to get in touch with their feminine side.
 

James Runcie The colour of heaven
The author is a film maker and shares the surname and lips of a former Archbishop of Canterbury, so we'll assume he's his son. And for a film maker he writes a damn fine novel. This is the story of a baby boy found drifting in a boat in a narrow canal by a woman, barren herself and yearning for a child. She takes him as her own, names him Paolo, raises him with her initially hostile husband, and forgives him his weakness. Foremost of these is his short-sightedness, which makes him a dangerous liability in his father's glassworks. He has a deep, almost spiritual, understanding of colour, however, and is soon apprenticed to a painter from Siena. The painter's search for the perfect ultramarine blue, for the sky of heaven in an important fresco, sends Paolo on a long journey in search of the rock from which this colour is made. This journey is the meat, and most of the pages, of the book and makes for a moving tale of a boy learning and growing and gradually seeing more clearly. The symbolism of his imperfect sight, and of the important things gradually coming into focus, is played well, but not worn out. There is sensuality too in the book's dealings with colour, food and love. The Venice content is not high, but the themes of colour (specifically Renaissance art's famous ultramarine) and of Venice's place as the gateway to the East seal it's place here. 

Jane Turner Rylands
Across the Bridge of Sighs
It wasn't easy approaching this book of stories with an open mind, after all the fuss of the author's feud with John Berendt, which I reported here. But I must have managed it, because I enjoyed it. The stories cover oddly similar ground to Berendt's book as they deal with the lives of present-day Venetians and the various plights facing the city itself. The characters are mostly prosperous, be they old money or new media types, and their lives and the stories are linked by events and palazzos - the most pervasive of the former being that most un-Venetian of tragedies, the fatal car crash. There's a tinge of the glitz-novel in places as the money flows and grows, but it would be unfair to class this as embossed-cover fare. The characters live and do real stuff - the trip to the hypermarket by the woman who ordinarily would send a servant has an authentic whiff. And as for the character who's supposed to represent John Berendt, a journalist called Cad Peacock, well I wouldn't have expected a hate-figure to have been represented as quite such a likeable character, for a journalist.

Edward Sklepowich

The last gondola
This is the story of an obsession - Urbino wants to write a book about Samuel Possle, a fellow American with a shady past and a gaunt silent servant. Our hero talks (and has disturbing dreams) about little else until he eventually gets an invite. Then the difficulties, and deaths, of his acquaintances begin to become linked with the enigmatic Possle and his dark palazzo. Urbino spends a lot of time walking around and pondering, and visiting sites convenient to the themes and the atmosphere, which is decidedly gothic and broadly literarily decadent this time. Habib is away for the length of the book, but the coy hints, and the lingering descriptions of Urbino's slim and lithe gondolier, continue the sly suggestiveness of Urbino and the Contessa's previous outing above. An involving read,  full of literary reference and Venetian flavour but more full of thought than action - as usual - which is fine by me.

Frail Barrier
When three people die in unsuspicious circumstances, but with suspicious swiftness and connectedness, Urbino begins to wonder. Two of them are acquaintances of Urbino and the Countess and so the marriages and predilections of some of their fiends get a bit of a raking over as Urbino puzzles things out. As ever there is much pondering and sparse action - most of the murders happen off screen, as it were, and the focus is on Urbino's thought processes as he wanders and walks around Venice. He far from fails to notice where his wanderings take him, and so this novel gives some very good Venice, as ever. Dorsoduro is the central sestiere here, but events and characters range far and wide. There are storms and a regatta, to add colour and event, and some colourful characters too. As restrained and elegant a novel as the people and places it deals with, and as you could wish for.
With thanks to Mr S for sending me a copy himself from Tunisia (after I'd had trouble getting one from his publisher) with two truly mouth-drying sheets of stamps attached!

The Veils of Venice
The action here opens with the Contessa and Urbino taking tea in Florian's and discussing an exhibition of Fortuny frocks that they're planning for the Contessa's palazzo. Their plans involve various members of the Pindars, an eccentric family that the Contessa is related to - a dress is to be leant and photographs are to be taken. A further connection is the fact that Mina the Contessa's maid is the lover of a  Pindar and has the misfortune to be found clutching a pair of scissors whilst standing above the stabbed and fast expiring Olimpia. So with an exhibition to plan our intrepid pair have also to find out who actually murdered Olimpia, as Mina is obviously innocent. As is ever the case Urbino snaps into action by going for a stroll and having a good think. Venice is a cold and snow-blanketed backdrop, with even Urbino's brother- in-law (he was once married?!) turning up to cast a bluffer light on the city and events, and to get shown some of the sights in a low key way. The Urbino novels are never going to described as fast-paced or brutal, but they do the  cerebral and the refined as good as any such series. And as the plot gains pace emotions gather and the grip increases, right up until the satisfying and unobvious conclusion.
 

Catherine Smith
Barozzi, or the Venetian sorceress
When a novel starts with lines the likes of  "Spare her! oh spare her! I implore thee" in frantic accents cried the aged Ferrand. "Accursed villains! wouldst thou imbrue thy hands in the blood of innocence? ... Horrible assassins! for such indeed you are, or why do I behold your stiletto raised against the pure bosom of Rosaline?" the modern reader naturally assumes there's irony afoot, or that we're being plunged straight into a hammy stage performance. But no - this book is archaically written all through, if mostly less breathlessly. This is equally exhausting and entertaining, as is the plot, with it's innocents murdered by bravos, villains repentant on their deathbeds, and late revelations most shocking . Yes, this is a Gothic Classic, but the OTT plotting is not matched by much description and so Venice - the major setting -  is barely sketched in, or indeed described at all, and so it's left to some vague mentions of San Lorenzo and gondolas to provide the Venetian flavour. Not a Venice fix, then, but undoubtedly an entertaining and overwrought book full of extraneous adverbs and adjectives - the sort of book where windows do not open but unclose. (And why are four of the  main characters confusingly called the Marchesa de Rosa, Rosaline, Rosa, and Rosalva? Couldn't even one of them be called something un-Rosa-ish?)

Don Taylor Daughters of Venice (play)
This is a play broadcast by the BBC in February 2008 featuring performances by Norman Rodway (as Vivaldi), Susan Fleetwood, Eve Hopkins, Timothy Watson, Rachel Atkins and Francis Barber. (I know plays aren't strictly speaking fiction but I figured that as this is my first I'd include it with novels for the time being.) It's another story dealing with the female orphans/musicians of the church of the Pietà. This time it's more to do with them and their keepers' dilemmas than it is with Vivaldi. The problem of what to do with the orphans when they've grown up is the strongest theme, with being married off to a smitten and twittish English milord as one option. The Englishman and his sardonic valet provide some broad comedy, which is thankfully not strong in any other parts of the story, although an air of unfussy cynicism pervades. Vivaldi appears quite late and is, initially, painted as  an impatient and greedy egotist. The issues are dealt with with a not unheavy hand, which suggests that this might be a play meant for a youngish audience, but the stories are mostly involving and the twists quite pleasing. The drama also boarders on the hysterical towards the end, but is still pretty moving. Not bad at all.

Christopher Whyte
The cloud machinery
It is 1761, the Carnival is in full flood, and a theatre in St Hyginus, Venice's smallest parish, is about to reopen. But the murder which caused its closure many years before has drawn many strangers to Venice, and the tales that they tell are barely believable. The murder victim, the ghostly figure who haunts the theatre building, a dead woman who walks, and a missing princess are all somehow linked with a powerful and shadowy figure who seems responsible for all of their fates. And in the background is the cloud machinery, a wondrous now-rusted contraption, central to the murder, looming over the stage of the old theatre, and over the plot. This is the wicked 1700s in Venice, again, but with added hints of magic - black and theatrical and musical - and plenty of mystery. There's a minor annoyance in the book's habit of translating the names of churches into English, where their Italian names are so familiar as to need no translation - St George the Major and St John and Paul, for example. It's all wickedly well written, though, and full of fine characters and conceits.

Jim Williams Scherzo
Subtitled A Venetian Entertainment, this is a murder mystery set in the Venice of Casanova. It uses many phrases lifted from Casanova's memoirs and one of the narrators/characters IS  Casanova, thinly veiled.  So, we know the source, what of the end result? Well, it's a Name of the Rose-ish set-up, with a crusty old philosopher bouncing ideas off of a younger acolyte. That the acolyte is a castrato rent boy is a departure, I grant you. Venice of this period is fertile for themes like deception, secrecy, and things generally not being what they seem, what with all that going around in masks and all. The book mines this fertile seam pretty well, in a suitably twisty and unpredictable way.

Barbara Wilson
The case of the orphaned bassoonists
OK, I admit it - when I started reading I didn't know that she was a lesbian. Cassandra Reilly, I mean, the 'globetrotting translator and accidental detective'  heroine of this series of novels. Her somewhat overheated interest in some of the female characters set me wondering, and her concentration on their physical attributes was, I started noticing, unusually fervent too. Would I have read it had it been advertised overtly as a lesbian novel? Well, probably not. Why? Well, I suppose because it would seem to me to be targeted at a niche market to which I do not belong, and there's always the suspicion that appealing to a specialist audience it would not then have the quality and general appeal to reach beyond it's intended fan base. But if this suspicion had stopped me picking this one up I would have missed a treat because, to confound my literary prejudices, Cassandra's a winning woman and it's easy to share her curiosity and love of Venice. The overwhelming preponderance of characters with same-sex romantic inclinations is a little hard to take statistically, but I suppose most 'straight' fiction's lack of gay characters is no less a challenge to the law of averages. The story also involves two thefts, one murder, one attempted murder, and a lot of bassoonists. More than one of the musicians is intent on finding out more about the orphans at the church of the Pietà during Vivaldi's time as a teacher there, and if any of them also  composed. The limited choices that would lead a mother to leave her child to the church to train as a musician are explored, and find fitting reflections in other, more contemporary, women's choices and their consequences. An involving crime novel, then, and much more besides. 

Venice continued...
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