7.2.2013. New York: Europa Editions. 278 pages. Translated by Anthony Shugaar.

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De Giovanni, first known in Italy for his Il Commissario Ricciardi ∫eries, delivers an entertaining noir that gets hammy in parts and doesn’t take itself too ∫eriously for most of its length–which is the novel’s weakness and yet sometimes also its most endearing quality. The hero is one Inspector Giuseppe Lojacono, a top-notch Sicilian police detective who’s been sidelined from his job and estranged from his family after being framed up by a Mafia informant, and now stashed in a desk job at the San Gaetano police station in Naples, where he plays poker on the computer and listens to his hapless desk partner Giuffre make cheesy jokes and say the phrase “mamma mia!” a lot.

But Naples is under siege by a killer (and just talking about the novel provokes me to use hammy phrases like “under siege by a killer”). This killer patiently blends into his surroundings, carefully planning, endlessly waiting, until he is able to commit something like the perfect murder (three of them, actually): meticulously timed, with no witnesses, no discernable motive, and almost no evidence for law enforcement to work with, except for the shell casing from his small handgun and the tear-stained tissues he leaves behind, which indicate that the killer cries as he performs the deed, leading the news media to dub him The Crocodile (cue scary music). Lojacono, working the graveyard shift, is called out to the scene of the Crocodile’s first murder, where he notices the Crocodile’s used tissues. He is accosted on the scene by his arrogant-jerk police sergeant boss Vincenza, and the brilliant (and conspicuously sexy) police magistrate Laura Piras, who is impressed by Lojacono’s uncommon intelligence (and it wouldn’t be a noir without the intrepid main character who’s smarter than all these other idiots), and ultimately brings him onto the case as the police force becomes more and more desperate to catch the killer.

There are a lot of standard crime novel “beats” here (i.e. the men gawp at beautiful women, the women are almost all either ugly or beautiful), but give de Giovanni credit for this: he knows his noir and makes it feel fresh and fun. His best chapters are point-of-view vignettes that manage to be lyrical and economical plot-wise, even if the characters portrayed are stereotypical in their broad outlines. He has a gift for inhabiting the perspectives of these different characters and making each of them sympathetic, though I thought the sections featuring the actual Crocodile himself–along with the mysterious Eleanora–were a bit much and I could have done with less of them–although I understand how the Crocodile’s chapters are meant to give us the sense of Naples as this massive place where people are totally indifferent to each other, to the point that a serial killer can easily blend in, a point reinforced when Lojacono likens the city traffic to a wall protecting the killer:

Lojacono has gotten used to thinking of the city as a wall. Mistrust, indifference, and the constant noise that drowns out words and makes a whispered conversation impossible. The traffic, the silent crowd, the hate-filled glares.

It is the inhumanity of the city that makes the Crocodile so effective. At other points, de Giovanni plays with the idea that Lojacono and the Crocodile think in similar ways, that they are similarly constricted by society. The book contains interesting, but not life-changing profundity.

Still many of de Giovanni’s vignettes, it must be emphasized, are beautifully cadenced in a Chandler-esque sort of way, so as the chapter in which Luisa Lorusso, mother of one of the victims, reveals the lurid connection between her and another parent of a victim:

Luisa Lorusso’s words came out broken, fragmented, pierced by the present pain of time now past. The words came out and mingled with the notes of the Neapolitan neo-melodic songs wailing out of the neighbors’ radios. . . . Out came the words . . . Out came the four years of working together . . . (etc.)

Flashes of a poetic style! We get caught up in this moment as readers, and de Giovanni knows when and how to let us surf those emotions in the course of the story. The prodigal son Mirko, the dutiful son of the well-known obstetrician Donato, the long-suffering parents Roberta and Orlando are each well-developed–de Giovanni has a knack for making readers sympathize with these characters in a matter of a page or two. He brings the reader into their hopes and dreams–and then has the Crocodile kill them; nonetheless, we are more engaged with these events (and especially the ending) because of this loving emotional groundwork de Giovanni has lain.

The ending of the novel (which I won’t deign to spoil) is suitably riveting and takes advantage of the expectations set by the tone of the rest of the novel and uses them to great effect. (ZIP! No more on that from me.)