Everyone Is Implicated

Randy Rosenthal reviews Juliet Grames’s new Italian mystery "The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia."

By Randy RosenthalSeptember 30, 2024

• Noir

AN IDEAL SETTING for a mystery is a mountain village in Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot. Especially in 1960, which is when Juliet Grames sets her new novel The ­­­­Lost Boy of Santa Chionia. Today, Calabria is infamous for the ’Ndrangheta—the least notorious of the three most prominent Italian mafias—but its Aspromonte region has long been known for its remoteness (some would say backwardness) and its legendary “brigand history,” with Robin Hood–like figures resisting the “imperialist” northern Italian state. Its medieval stone villages are perched on sheer cliffs, accessible only by dirt roads connected by flimsy bridges that wash out in rainstorms. Such is the event that sets Grames’s mystery in motion: a multiday rainstorm causes a flood to run through the cliff-clinging Calabrian village of Santa Chionia, destroying its waterfall-spanning bridge and sweeping away its post office—which reveals a human skeleton buried in its foundation.

Grames’s 27-year-old American heroine Francesca Loftfield witnesses the wreckage of the flood and the human remains. Was someone murdered here? she wonders. No, of course not, the village authorities assure her. Nothing like that happens in Santa Chionia. There’s no crime, no murder. They’re just shepherds and farmers, simple Christians. Or so they tell her. Barnard-educated and raised in Philadelphia, Francesca works for Child Rescue, an international charity that sets up nursery schools in neglected areas, a job she found after dropping out of her Oxford doctorate program to marry an Italian man, from whom she’s since separated. She’s there in the heart of the Aspromonte not only because she’s an activist and altruist who values the lives of malnourished, uneducated, lice-ridden children more than her own, but also because her mother is from Calabria, so she’s fluent in Calabrese as well as Italian.

She even knows some Greco, the remnant local dialect from the time when Calabria was part of the Area Grecanica, the Mediterranean colonies of ancient Greece, with the Calabrian city of Sybaris being one of the largest in Europe. In fact, it was a 14th-century Greco speaker who, Francesca claims, translated the works of Homer into Latin, kicking off the Renaissance. Grames isn’t simply showing off her erudition with this mention of Greco; rather, it’s Francesca’s knowledge of the language that involves her in the mystery. An old Greco lady takes her aside and surreptitiously asks Francesca to investigate what happened to her son, who supposedly immigrated to the United States decades earlier but whom the woman thinks may be the skeleton found beneath the ruined post office. Using her access, intellect, and resources, Francesca embraces her inner Nancy Drew, unearthing one village secret after another.

As the author of the best-selling 2019 novel The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna (which is also partly set in Calabria, but not a mystery) and the editorial director of Soho Press’s crime imprint, Juliet Grames knows what she’s doing—she has not only crafted a gripping mystery amid an alluring atmosphere; she also writes with masterful prose, with phrasings that spin, jump, and slap around like a graceful but drunk ballerina. For instance, describing the view from Santa Chionia’s piazza, Grames paints a picture of “the foothills glinting like the green dorsals of fish tumbling toward the concealed promise of the sea.” And when Francesca is stuck inside during the storm with her stubborn old hostess Cicca, Grames conjures the scene: “We sat with a pine sap lamp burning between us in her second-floor salon, redolent with the wet-dog smell of rennet. Even over that I caught the oily scent of Cicca’s scalp, peachily visible in the space between her rather far-flung follicles.” In this way, Grames consistently delights readers with delicious descriptions as they follow Francesca’s unraveling of the mystery.

Or at least her attempts to do so. Because no one in Santa Chionia wants to talk about the region’s darker characteristics, especially not with an outsider. Francesca comes to help, but as often happens with do-gooders, she causes more suffering than she alleviates. And the more she tries to find out, the more people clam up, withdrawing their support for her budding nursery school. As someone who believes that education is the way out of poverty, Francesca is dismayed that those in charge of the village—a mysterious and powerful “they”—would prevent progress when that’s precisely what’s so evidently needed. This conflict forms the thematic core of Grames’s novel: the do-gooding outsider calling into question the morally disturbing traditions of an undeveloped region. Initially, such traditions strike the reader as quaint—for instance, the custom of a prospective groom leaving a piece of wood outside the home of his desired bride’s father: if the father accepts the suitor, he brings the wood inside; otherwise, he gives the suitor back the wood in a public place, humiliating him. Francesca watches such a scene play out, to her and the reader’s voyeuristic fascination.

Yet then she learns about the time when the village elders “married” a sexually abusive priest to a goat before throwing him off a cliff, and about the incidences of “reparative marriage,” a euphemism for when a man abducts and rapes a young woman, who is then forced to marry her rapist. Francesca declares that this is “a crime, a violent crime, and criminals should be held responsible,” but she is told that the violence is repaired through the marriage itself, in which the man does “the right thing.” Though this may seem like just an isolated instance of “Aspromonte justice,” it is also reflected in the Italian legal code, which, at the time of the novel’s setting, did not define rape as a violent crime but as a “crime against public morality,” and which allowed a rapist to nullify his crime if he “‘rehabilitated’ his ‘dishonored’ victim.” There was no backup plan, either in the mountains or in the ostensibly civilized cities, for cases when the woman did not submit to be “rehabilitated.” Such a woman would be killed. And the police would never be involved. In fact, if anyone went to the police, they’d be killed too. As one powerful woman warns Francesca, “A mother would kill her own daughter before she would let her collaborate with the police.” That’s the “omertà”—the Calabrian code of silence. And it makes everyone complicit in whatever crimes “they” do. “Don’t you see?” a local man asks Francesca, in response to her query about who “they” really are. “It’s no one person—it’s the system. Everyone is implicated.”

Such is the atmosphere of menace that Grames builds, slowly but steadily, page by page. An undercurrent of violence seethes beneath the surface, palpable under every gesture that occurs in Santa Chionia, every interaction Francesca has, every setback to her plan to open her school. As she pulls the threads of the village’s secrets, Francesca eventually starts to understand the region. First, she discovers that the legendary Giuseppe Musolino, known as the “King of the Aspromonte” or “gentleman-thief” who robbed the rich to help impoverished orphans and avenge the dishonored, was, in reality, “nothing but a hit man from a criminal family.” Eventually, Francesca wonders,

Was there some kind of bumpkin mafia in Santa Chionia? A hinterland militia of self-styled honorable men who kept the villages under their own extrajudicial control—something more organized than a handful of temperamental ditchdiggers with the traditional stilettos and grudges?

Unlike the more well-known Cosa Nostra of Sicily and the Camorra around Naples, the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta—a term Grames never uses in the novel—is more loosely structured and seemingly less sophisticated. Today, it is known as one of the most powerful organized crime groups in the world, controlling drug trafficking and arms smuggling routes into Europe. That wasn’t the situation back in 1960, when Francesca’s tale takes place, but there was another illicit substance this loosely organized group of “honorable men” were smuggling then: timber. Though Calabria was historically a charcoal-producing region, in the 19th century the newly unified Italian government, in an effort to preserve the region’s natural landscapes, prohibited the cutting of trees and even goat herding, effectively outlawing the Calabrians’ traditional means of livelihood. Of course the people turned to organized crime, Francesca realizes, because what other legal options did the government give them?

That’s not to say Francesca sympathizes with the criminal syndicate of the area, though she does remain a Calabrian apologist. Yes, she tells the village priest that the people “are so backward,” but she doesn’t want to give up on them, or on her mission. Yes, the region may have an underlying darkness, but, as Francesca tells her reader,

through education we could shine a light to cut through the bleakest darkness. Through education could the grandchildren of killers and the grandchildren of their victims be lifted above their parents’ misery, the sins and scars of their forebears washed away from their innocent little personalities.

Amen to that.