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Mauro’s impending court case is, we rapidly infer, not the least of his 55-year-old multiple-murderer parent’s worries, for Verona, so long amenable to the furtherance of his schemes, looks to be closing ranks against him. His plan to sponsor an art exhibition on the theme of ‘Painting Death’ is being stymied by the local museum director, Dr Volpi. His student daughter, Massimina, is bedroom-bound on social media, and his ever more pious wife is locked in the metaphorical arms of her confessor. To make matters worse, the investiture marks the return into Duckworth senior’s life of Stan Albertini, who knows far too much about his friend’s past to be allowed to remain alive.
Parks’s Maurice Duckworth novels — comic thrillers, built on the absence of a moral core — draw their vitality from at least three different sources. The first is the reader’s growing awareness of a back-story crammed with the ghosts of knocked-off wives and business partners. The second is Maurice’s reliability, or lack of it, as a witness. The third is the thoroughness of the detail with which Parks invests his account of Veronese life: the Northern League busily infiltrating the council chamber; His Eminence intimidating the traffic cops; and rats lurking in every bureaucratic arras.
Inevitably, much of what follows has a tongue-in-cheek quality: Parks himself has a cameo role as ‘Timothy Parkes’, contributor of a ‘few pathetically disrespectful captions’ to a rival art show, and there is also mention of ‘Tobias Joyce’, author of The Black Hole of Italy — that is, Tobias Jones, author of The Dark Heart of Italy. Meanwhile, as the novel reaches its final stretch, with Dr Volpi dead in his basement, Maurice arraigned on a murder charge, and a fine old church-led conspiracy underway, there remains the question of what, and who, to believe.
Neatly written, full of calamitous moments in which the comedy is suddenly elbowed aside by genuine emotion (see, for example, the scene in which Maurice attends his much-disliked father’s funeral), Painting Death suffers only from the sense of playing to a small and highly exclusive gallery. Perhaps, like his creation, Parks has spent too long abroad. Certainly, cognoscenti will doubt that Maurice’s dad attended Queens Park Rangers games in a green-and-white bobble hat, for QPR play in blue hoops.
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