The Wooden Leg of Inspector Anders
Penzler Pick,April 2001:Mystery debuts don't come much better than this, and Marshall Browne's Australian crime-writing peers evidently agree: in 2000 this Melbourne writer was presented with the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime Novel published down under. What makes Browne's achievement fascinating is the fact that the book's setting is Italy and its title character, the fatalistic one-legged policeman, Anders, is that rarest of creatures: a man willing to confront the Mafia in the dark heart of its own lair.Inspector D.P. Anders is a much-decorated Roman cop poised on the brink of retirement; when we meet him, he is newly arrived in an unnamed southern city. He has been dispatched there to make a report on a peculiarly Italian set of circumstances: a magistrate investigating the assassination of an anti-Mafia judge has himself been brutally slain. But the coils of interlinked and complicit corruption that Anders encounters will surprise only the reader (though, of course, not those familiar with Michael Dibdin's equally elegantAurelio Zenseries).A wounded veteran of his country's perpetual and deadly internal war zone, Inspector Anders had lost his leg in an explosion set by left-wing terrorists nearly two decades earlier. Now he travels with a spare artificial limb, a prosthesis that will play an important role in the high-voltage climax but which for most of the book occupies our attention mainly when he unstraps it to get into bed (and not always alone).Simply written but to gorgeous effect, Browne's prose makes palpable the "atmosphere of demons barely held at bay," which Inspector Anders perceives as the sinister miasma over the city of his final assignment. Meanwhile, just about every official contact he pursues puts him face-to-face with yet another bureaucrat or churchman tightly in the absolute grip of that "vast black shadow" that dictates their civic treachery and binds them to evil.The Wooden Leg of Inspector Andersstraps us into a truly hair-raising ride that nonetheless has the feel of a classic hero's journey.--Otto Penzler