I’m looking forward to meeting Charles Thoroughgood and Commissario Soneri. If they arrive in time I will take them both away with me next week and go to bed with them – not at the same time obviously.
Charles is a soldier who becomes an MI6 agent, the creation of Alan Judd, who appears in a series of seven spy thrillers. Best read in order, the first is Breed of Heroes (1981). Perhaps surprisingly, I had only heard of Alan Judd as the motoring correspondent in The Spectator. That mag does choose good contributors; one of my favourite columns was bullfighting penned first by Alexander Fiske-Harrison who proves the adage Etonians crop up everywhere, even as a bullfighter. His successor, Tristan Garel-Jones, was just as knowledgeable but did not have quite the same bloody hands-on experience. Anyway, Judd has written a lot of thrillers to keep me going when I am through with Thoroughgood.
Commissario Soneri is another unknown quantity. He is the creation of Valerio Varesi, Parma correspondent for La Stampa and La Repubblica. Although Varesi is a prolific author, only six of his novels have been translated into English, all about Commissario Soneri, the first of which is River of Shadows (2010). Like Commissario Brunetti he lives in the Veneto and I’m told there’s plenty about what he eats and drinks. Soneri has been called an Italian Maigret who, you will remember, was happy to drink literally around the clock.
For some reason, although I enjoyed Montalbano on TV, I never read the books by Andrei Camilleri and there are twenty-eight of them starting with The Shape of Water (1994).
So I pass no judgement on these characters except to say they were recommended by a highly reliable source. I can recommend a series of seven novels by Iain Pears in which I met Jonathan Argyll and Flavia di Stefano. Their adventures start with The Raphael Affair ( 1990) as they solve art-related crimes and multiple murders. Jonathan is a picture dealer, largely based in Rome: Flavia is a plain clothes operative in an Italian police art theft department. She is hot but, spoiler, it takes Argyll a few books to get together with her; he is a shy Englishman.
Are you beach-ready now?