Mar 03 2008
The disappearances of Madalena Grimaldi
The Weekend Book Review. In the ‘detective for everyone’ pattern, there’s nothing new about women writing women detectives (these days we have art-dealing, cab-driving, and handicapped P.Is) and Marela Day has lovingly restored for your reading pleasure this straight hard-boiled detective entertainment.
The disappearances of Madalena Grimaldi
It is the start of a long hot summer, bushfires are looming, and Madalena Grimaldi has disappeared. Claudia is hired to find the missing schoolgirl but she’s already working on a case - the death of Guy Valentine, her father.
As Claudia searches the streets, looking for the ghost of her derelict father and for the mysterious man who can lead her to Madalena, she finds herself sinking into a world where rock bottom is only the beginning.
Private investigator Claudia Valentine, who wrestles with her cases (and sometimes with her clients) over a hotel/wine bar in the city fringe of Sydney, is a typical private eye with the typical methods of scouring the streets for clues, and picking up discreet surveillance jobs while tossing down too much alcohol.
In her spare time she comes to terms with a failed marriage and the children who no longer live with her. Claudia is still a few years on the good side of forty, feels flabby but tries to keep in shape. She sometimes has too much to drink, sometimes accepts boring jobs for the money, sometimes is led astray by handsome rogues, and sometimes makes embarrassing mistakes - a genuinely likable woman.
In this fourth book, Claudia covers an awful lot of territory. From Lugarno in the south, to Kings Cross in the dingy heart of the city, in and under Sydney’s streets, she uncovers the mystery of the missing 15 year old girl against a backdrop of a hot, dry city constantly shrouded in smoke and ringed by bushfires.
This atmosphere of a grim, desolate landscape is reflected in her desperation during both her personal and professional searches.
This use of the prevailing weather conditions strikes a chord in the memory, Ray Chandler used the strong, dry Santa Ana wind that sweeps through Southern California to great effect in his classic short story, Red Wind, from *Trouble Is My Business. The isolation, the drinking and the wisecracking are very much vintage Chandler too.
The style may come from the world of a million paperbacks and pulp magazines but Day also has the knack of making you feel at home in a city you may have never seen. The streets become familiar, the characters recognisable, yet there’s a real Australian ‘feel’.
Author Marele Day won a PWA Shamus for Best Paperback Original Private Eye Novel for *The Last Tango of Dolores Delgado, the third book in her excellent series.
Originally published in Australia, this is the fourth Claudia Valentine mystery, but the first to be transplanted to U.S.A. If this is the first time you meet Claudia, you have a treat coming. And a good giggle.
I found her first novel* The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender by accident years ago and I nearly fell off my chair laughing on the first page. I have read it six or seven times since, and I bought the next three the first week that they were released. But Day’s books should not be categorised into the humour basket, rather they are lighthearted detective stories.
The disappearances of Madalena Grimaldi is great fun, an engaging book in which the heroine is delightful, the violence is minimal and the mysteries are neatly solved.
The earlier novels
The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender
The Last Tango of Dolores Delgado
Like to shout me a cold beer?
