#RivetingReviews: Max Easterman reviews RUNAWAY HORSES by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini

One of the pleasures of reading Italian crime novels is the ‘extras’ that their authors frequently drop into the text: little anecdotes about a person or place or time, which are sometimes almost irrelevant to the story, but which grip the reader’s imagination because of their eccentricity, unexpectedness or vivid colour. And then, there’s the philosophising, the discursive analysis of a situation or someone’s behaviour, which we might assume would hold up or confuse the action but which in fact illuminates it and gives it context. It becomes an essential part of the evidence trail. This is very much the case with Fruttero and Lucentini: Runaway Horses is their second collaboration to be published by the excellent Bitter Lemon Press in another splendid translation from Gregory Dowling.

Like its predecessor – The Lover of No Fixed Abode – Runaway Horses takes place over just a few days around an Italian city: in this case Siena, in the prelude to that almost mystical, certainly ancient but still very contemporary event, the Palio, the horse-race run round the famous piazza del Campo. But, unlike in their previous book, there is this time a dead body and some serious Machiavellian duplicity for the protagonists to contend with. They are a Milanese lawyer, Enzo Maggione, and his wife Valeria. He deals with events as they are, pragmatically, cynically; she cannot take life as it comes but broods on what confronts and affects her. As the visit to Siena begins to threaten the commonplace orderliness of their marriage, Maggione reflects that his wife can’t accept the idea of destiny or chance: Like all women … she needs to trace the chain of events … to discover the one she feels is crucial … even if nothing can be done about it now. Valeria, however, senses a real crisis: … countless gestures she has had to repress … caresses, endearments, outpourings … kept locked up inside her and now stab her like rheumatic pains. But Enzo … doesn’t want to hear the word ‘crisis’ … rejects the definition, considering it unseemly tomfoolery … that’s why he has started to find everything false and unreal.

And into this marital quagmire steps destiny and hands them an unforeseen and unwelcome dilemma …

The couple were on their way to spend a few days with friends, who live outside Siena, and then to go and watch the horse race. But they take a wrong turning in a violent, blinding hailstorm and find themselves in the wrong house. The owner offers them refuge from the storm until they can move on to their friends’ place; however, they soon realise they’re in somewhere special: a palazzo and the owner is the head of one of the contrade – city wards – competing for the race’s prize: the silk banner or palio. The Maggiones decide to leave as soon as is decently possible, but the phone lines are down and, as events unfold, they find themselves lured by being ‘on the inside’, in on the planning for the Palio. As their host Guidobaldo remarks, the race lasts hardly 100 seconds but those 100 seconds are like an orgasm: If you forget this, you understand nothing about the Palio. The climax is lightning swift, but the tension has been building up, swelling, for the whole year. And so the couple are drawn almost as by an invisible hand into the feuding, plotting, bribery and worse that surround and indeed underpin the contest. Pride, prestige, influence, rivalry are its psychological and spiritual underbelly and they force Enzo and Valeria to test the very foundations of their marriage.

In The Lover of no Fixed Abode Venice is a main ‘player’ in the story; here, Siena is both the backdrop and main act, but it’s less the city than its people who are the focus, how they plot and counter-plot: a study in human character and interaction, brilliant in both its detail and wry humour. Friendships are formed, grow, blossom then suddenly end as necessity or contrada loyalties dictate. Everything is predicated on the demands of the Palio, to behave otherwise is to court anything from emotional hostility to physical danger. Someone may kill to clinch the palio – or to stop someone else from doing so: A shriek. A desperate howl of death. A scream of agony, there, in the middle of the night.

Once again, Fruttero and Lucentini have taken a seemingly innocuous place and event and delved deep into its secrets to produce a compelling story, told with sharpness of insight and in sparkling language.

Reviewed by Max Easterman

RUNAWAY HORSES

Written by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini

Translated from the Italian by Gregory Dowling

Published by Bitter Lemon Press (January 2025)

December 2024 #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.

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of DEAD MAN DANCING by Jógvan Isaksen

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of THE LOVER OF NO FIXED ABODE by Carlo Fruterro and Franco Lucentini

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of WHAT’S COOKING IN THE KREMLIN. A MODERN HISTORY OF RUSSIA THROUGH THE KITCHEN DOOR by Witold Szabłowski

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of THE MURDER OF ANTON LIVIUS by Hansjörg Schneider

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of THE GIRL IN THE EAGLE’S TALONS by Karin Smirnoff

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of THIRTY DAYS OF DARKNESS by Jenny Lund Madsen

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of THE WIDOW COUDERC by Georges Simenon

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of EVEN THE DARKEST NIGHT: A TERRA ALTA INVESTIGATION by Javier Cercas

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of VIENNA THE INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL by Angus Robertson

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of SIMENON. THE MAN, THE BOOKS, THE FILMS by Barry Forshaw

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of LITTLE DRUMMER by Kjell Ola Dahl

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of DARK MUSIC by David Lagencrantz