I had to wait a few minutes on the ground floor of Waterstones flagship branch on Piccadilly while Robert went upstairs to buy the new John Niven (not to be confused with David N).
I was a browser not a buyer but I’m an addict and found myself taking away this quintet.
Although I haven’t finished Doctor Thorne I have already started The Honoured Society; The Sicilian Mafia Observed by Norman Lewis. He is one of the finest travel writers in English and it comes as a surprise that he has not featured here before. The only one of his books that I have hitherto read is Naples ‘44, an account of his service there in the Intelligence Corps in WW II. He wrote thirteen novels and the same number of non-fiction books – mostly travel. I suspect his novels should be swerved but I am engrossed in his history of the Mafia.
“The Honoured Society describes how the US army returned the Mafia to power in 1944, after Mussolini had come close to destroying it. It looks at the Mafia in their homeland – how in attempting to preserve Sicily for the Sicilians in the face of countless invasions, it infiltrated every aspect of the island’s life, corrupting landowners, the police, the judiciary and even the church. In one chilling chapter, Norman Lewis details the escapades of eighty-year-old Padre Camelo, who led his monks on sprees of murder and extortion, frequently using the confessional box for transmitting threats.”
If that hasn’t whetted your appetite perhaps this extract, reminiscent of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, will.
”Listen to Nick Gentile, an American capo-Mafia, discussing the ethics of eliminating an uncontrollable young criminal: ‘There was nothing we could do with him, so he had to be rubbed out. We embalmed the body and sent it back to his people in Sicily. His folks were poor – they didn’t have anything – so we put a diamond ring on his finger, the way they’d see it as soon as they opened the casket. I guess we did the right thing. We figured otherwise he’d have finished up in the chair or the gas-chamber. That way they wouldn’t even have had his body back.’ “
If you don’t know where this was filmed read this 2016 post.