Although Il Nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), still our unique mystery masterpiece, contained a locked room murder, Umberto Eco treated the problem superficially and in an off-hand manner. His later venture into the genre, the quite awful Baudolino, is now deservedly forgotten. Critics and Christie experts Calcerano and Fiori presented a well-devised locked room murder in the political thriller L’Uomo di vetro. Claudia Salvatori used a similar trick in her playful mystery Mistero a Castel Rundegg, but the book was more of a game than a sound and solid detective novel.
And so we enter, sadly and disconsolately, into a very dry and dusty new Millennium, which would have been quite hopeless and mournful, had not a few new authors sprung up miraculously (may I say impossibly?) like daisies in the Nullarbor desert. So let me be your Napoleon Bonaparte, the Aborigine guide and scout, and pick for you from our native Ayers Rock the beautiful flowers carefully tended and planted by Giulio Leoni (his E Trentuno con la morte presents a splendid locked room murder during the D'Annunzio Escapade in Fiume, and his La Donna nella luna inserted a locked studio murder on the set of the famous Fritz Lang and Thea Von Harbou Sci-Fi effort). And Stefano di Marino briefly abandoned the Spy-story intrigue to give us the almost Lovecraftesque exploits of his conjuror sleuth Bas Salieri. Il Palazzo dalle cinque porte is one of the best Italian post-war mysteries. Pietro “Piero” Di Palma ,blogger and locked room expert and enthusiast, has found in LRI’s The Realm of the Impossible his well-deserved international recognition and, with any luck, Enrico Luceri, another hope of Italian New Age of Honkaku, may yet give us a multiple impossible crime novel.
I can only cross my very crooked fingers and hope that the planted seeds will transform my local, unfortunate, plagued and doomed Italian desert into a tropical Golden Age jungle .....
Igor Longo, Torino 2019
The Flying Boat Mystery Page 16
