Venice isn't all stunning buildings, turquoise canals and quaint art galleries. Away from the land of tourists and cheap masks, beyond Torcello, there's its Lagoon and salt marshes that are being eroded. And part time ecology student, Stella Butler, is determined to study them on a short break to the city, only to be, er, waylaid, after helping an old bloke at the airport who collapses.
Turns out he's a world famous artist, or ex-famous artist as he drops dead on the plane, leaving Stella in the midst of a fifty year old mystery featuring a has-been rock star called Keef Cottesloe, a venetian blind woman, plenty of 'dysfunctional' teenage models and muses, and Alex Osbourne, a painter of semi-nude women in his very weird studio cum home, The House with Three Eyes.
There's "something indefinable going on" says Stella to herself as early as page 34...and so it turns out, as characters weave in and out of the plot, two with the same name, bumping into each other all over the place during the manic course of a week.
Lurking in the foreground, always, is Venice itself, its magnificent squares and cafes, but also its shell fishing grounds, its fisherman's huts and its diesel-fumed boats and launches. This is a novel that could only work in Venice, that can only be believable in Venice. Unbelievably.
At 179 pages The House with Three Eyes is short but crammed with old happenings, new events, lovers, daughters, not daughters, sons, wives and non-wives, plus some bemused police, Rita Hayworth's dress and earrings, and some gruesome goings on.
The House with Three Eyes is not a whodunnit murder mystery. It's just a mystery. No murders. And a strange first novel for John Harding to write, after factual books including Sweetly Sings Delaney, the ace biog of Shelagh Delaney. But it works.
If you're looking for something to grip you while you wait for the travel corridors to open, this is the exotic book. And when those corridors do open, be careful who you help at the airport. You could end up with a sports bag full of...well that would be telling...
The House with Three Eyes: A Venetian Mystery by John Harding
Published by Greenwich Exchange – click here for more details and to order it.
Review by Stephen Kingston
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
(3).jpeg)
.png)
(1).JPG)
