#RivetingReviews: Max Easterman reviews AN ENIGMA BY THE SEA by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, translated by Gregory Dowling

As I have remarked before in #RivetingReviews, one of the great pleasures of Italian crime novels in particular is the ability of their authors to reflect on issues that seem to have little to do with the actual plot but nonetheless have much to do with the business of life and how it’s lived and how it affects us all, not just the protagonists in the novel. It’s a tribute to the writing abilities of authors like Fruttero and Lucentini that such discursive topics rarely, if ever, get in the way of the action but rather provide colour and background to it, as well as making entertaining and instructive reading. Moreover, as here with An Enigma by the Sea, they add a dose of eccentric humour to this story, which, although it has echoes of Agatha Christie, is on an altogether higher plane. Fruttero and Lucentini offer us their knowledgeable analysis of pre-Christian Graeco-Roman philosophy and, less abstractly, of mental depression. This is the third of their novels from Bitter Lemon Press, in another first-class translation by Gregory Dowling. The scene this time is the Maremma, the beautiful coastline of southern Tuscany with its miles of private beaches and impenetrable woodlands. As the authors remark A certain air of secrecy hangs over it …

Of course, there is ‘secrecy’, enlivened here by a cast of characters that would not be out of place in a Feydeau farce – though the only really farcical element in this case is the inability of the carabinieri to get even close to solving the crime. So, as Christmas approaches in the narrative, the gualdana, an enclave of properties owned by wealthy Italians and other Europeans and protected by a coterie of uniformed guards and a forest of 18,300 pine trees, plays host to a few hardy but festive villa-owners – as you might expect, the perfect setting for something dark and sinister. The colourful gathering consists, amongst others, of a depressive academic in love with a mother-of-two deserted by her husband, who has in his turn married the wife of another villa-owner; a down-at-heel, adulterous aristocrat who … has always fornicated …mwith no ulterior motives … and who arrives with an aspiring young actress in tow; a duo of professional and popular stand-up comedians, who’ve escaped a family Christmas, desperate to overcome their creative ‘block’ but who are persistently disagreeing on how to achieve this: Two firemen meet in the station yard, where there’s a tiny Christmas tree with just one candle … suggests one. Firemen aren’t funny …, retorts the other. Also escaping are a couple from Rome, who have come for the holidays, but the signora suffers from depression and decides to leave immediately to consult her doctor while her husband grits his teeth as she packs and unpacks, vacillates, searches in panic for a mislaid drug: … everything that happens around her reaches her as if from immense distances, like an echo rolling hollowly down dark gorges and then dispersing across lugubrious deserts. We also meet two elderly Swiss women, who spend their days endlessly and ominously trying to predict events from Tarot cards; Ugo the Hermit, a retired professor who’s been a fixture in the Maremma for some years and obsesses over the Cynic philosophers, especially Diogenes and Cratès, the ‘Door-Opener’; and, finally, a self-important member of parliament, whose villa is infested by tree rats. When a corpse is inevitably washed up on the beach, the MP is convinced that the death was not the result of murder but caused by a pine-cone falling from one of the trees. The tension mounts: was it murder or accidental? If it was murder which of this motley crew might have ‘done it’?

The body turns out to be that of the philandering aristocrat, whose beautiful young lover has vanished from his villa. Then the mystery deepens when the couple from Rome disappear without trace or explanation. The denizens of the gualdana are puzzled, anxious, dismayed by these events, but even more by the possible intrusion of the media into their precious privacy if the story gets out. Also puzzled are the carabinieri! Monforti, the depressive academic, emerges from his depression as a latterday Poirot and it’s left to him to find meaning in his life as an amateur detective. He works out the who, the how and the why of the three disappearances. He gets his man … but will he get the woman he loves?

Once again, the authors Fruttero and Lucentini have taken a seemingly innocuous situation, place and time and delved deep into its secrets to produce a compelling story, which grips your imagination, and entertains and informs with their sharpness of insight. They weave a tangled and complex web of detail, which holds you in suspense right to the end, all underpinned by their fine literary sense and colourful language. It’s a wonderful read, with the added bonus of peeking into the world of the Cynic philosophers and their co-evals, something you’d never get from an Agatha Christie novel!

Reviewed by Max Easterman

AN ENIGMA BY THE SEA

Written by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini

Translated from the Italian by Gregory Dowling

Published by Bitter Lemon Press (2026)

December 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Max Easterman spent thirty-five years as a BBC broadcaster. He was a lecturer in journalism for seventeen years at Huddersfield University and is today a translator, media trainer with Sounds Right, jazz musician and reviewer.

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