I Will Have Vengeance

Maurizio de Giovanni

4 ideas

1. The tenor murdered at San Carlo

   In March 1931, the celebrated tenor Arnaldo Vezzi, a favourite of the Fascist regime, is found dead in his dressing room at Naples' Teatro San Carlo during a performance. His throat was cut with a shard of his own broken mirror. Commissario Ricciardi pursues the case despite political pressure to close it quickly and quietly. He works through the singer's many enemies, because Vezzi's arrogance and cruelty toward colleagues, staff and women gave nearly everyone around him a motive.

2. The Deed: seeing the dead's last thought

   Ricciardi privately calls his affliction 'the Deed'. He sees the victims of violent or sudden death at the spot where they died, repeating the final thought or words they had at the moment of death. The vision gives him an emotional fragment, not a solution. He still has to work out what the words meant and who caused the death, so the gift frames the question rather than answering it.

3. All crime springs from hunger or love

   Ricciardi holds that every crime comes from one of two sources: hunger, meaning need, poverty and material desperation, or love, meaning desire, jealousy, possession and wounded feeling. On this view a murder is solved by finding the pressure that turned an ordinary person violent, not by searching for monstrous evil. It also means the killer is often as much a casualty of pain as the victim.

4. Witnessing suffering as isolating burden

   Because Ricciardi constantly sees the pain of the dead, he believes the capacity to love leads only to more suffering. He keeps himself from human connection, including his silent attachment to the woman he watches through a neighbouring window. The book treats deep empathetic perception as something that isolates the perceiver. Knowing too much of others' pain can make a person withdraw from life instead of engaging with it.

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