This 1975 award winning thriller has not withstood the ravages of the decades, at least for this reader. Ninety pages in, the protagonist is still unsympathetic, the plot unbelievable, the tedium unendurable ... Sorry folks, on to the next one. ( )

Real Rating: 3.5* of five

At the end of May 2019, Criminal Element ran its weekly piece on the past winners of the Edgar Award for best crime/mystery novel of the year. They were up to 1975, and the winner was this title by Jon Cleary. A thriller set in Rome and the Vatican, it details the accidental kidnapping of the recently-elected Pope, a German survivor of Dachau and the first non-Italian in the job for over 450 years. Unpopular with the Vatican bureaucrats and conservative Catholics, a liberalizing and revitalizing figure beloved of the people, the Pope's past in Germany was going to come and play merry Hell with his present.

So Cleary, Australian and Catholic, clearly saw the election of John Paul II in 1978 and foresaw that the controversial figure would be the subject of much opposition as well as adulation. Way to go, Cleary!

This story, however, goes deeper into geopolitics as it involves the IRA, then in the midst of that bloodbath we call The Troubles, although I myownself would call it "the stupid bloody pigheaded gobshites killing anyone they damned well pleased and calling it patriotism," but there you are. The Vatican's oodles and buckets of treasures are to be raided from within via a forgotten, now-subterranean, grotto. A Vatican insider, American so immune from suspicion (that would NOT have flown in 1975 Italy, BTW, paranoid in the grip of its own terror from the "Communist" Red Brigades), one Fergus McBride helps identify a way in to the Vatican's storied hoard and co-ordinate the holding-for-ransom of the objects. This is all in aid of stopping the killing of The Troubles. With the Vatican's ransom money retrieving their objects, the IR-no-longer-A would resort to bribery and intimidation instead of murder and mayhem.

So we can see this is a fantasy.

The Pope throws a wrench into the doin's by deciding to send these very objects (just think! such a coincidence!) on a world museum tour that he's just thunk up and is going to send the stuff off the very day the IRA dudes planned to steal it, so their plan goes into 24-hour-earlier chaos.

I'm not going to belabor the obvious idiocy of this turn of events because I expect anyone old enough to care about this book will also be worldly-wise enough to know that musea take YEARS to set up exhibitions, the insurance companies require *detailed* plans and proof of adequate security before they'll insure a move, and no museum on the surface of the Earth would *dream* of touching uninsured relics. Not even in 1975.

The forgotten basement of the Vatican is breached (!) and there is a major structural collapse, yet all our IRA thieves are alive! And then the Pope decides to wander downstairs to have a look at the goodies he's blithely consigned to unknown destinations (apparently far and wide, again not remotely realistic as stuff like that in the Vatican's hoard moves in curated bunches or not at all), thus putting himself in line for kidnapping.

Like Aldo Moro, ex-PM of Italy, just three years later. Only Moro ended up dead after 55 days, not rescued in two.

Anyway, onward the plot careens, a juggernaut crushing many vestiges of realism in service of excitement and action. That is this book's raison d'etre: Excitement and action, which Cleary delivers. Sensible plot developments, no; fun set-pieces and chases, yes.

Cleary brings us into the station with a skeleton crew (y'all who bother to read the book will now wince) but the Pope intact. There was no doubt from the get-go that the Pope would not die. That's not the way of the thriller in 1975. Assassinations are headlined, not thrown in as plot twists. But the point was the ride, no doubt about it, and if you're up for a midcentury misogynist's fast-paced and exciting romp, this is a good choice. It didn't win the Edgar for its intricate plotting. But win it did, and judged by the purpose the book was written to serve (action thriller), it deserved the accolade. ( )

In my continuing project to read all of the Edgar Best Novel winners, I've reached 1975, when PETER'S PENCE by Jon Cleary won the award. (Published 1974.) This book is difficult to summarize without spoilers. Suffice it to say that in involves the Vatican, the IRA, the Nuremberg trials, decaying Italian aristocracy, and the relationships between fathers and sons. Cleary wove all these elements, and more, into a thriller which, while it started slowly, built up momentum and delivered several breath-holding moments before the climax and resolution.

I looked at the other titles nominated for that year, and the only one I was familiar with was Andrew Garve's THE LESTER AFFAIR. Since I'm a great admirer of Garve's books, I think I probably would have voted for him (had I been eligible), but my memory isn't good enough to say whether that was one of his best. In any case, from a vantage point of thirty-plus years later, a book in which many major premises were almost unbelievable visions of the future (a German Pope! Vatican treasures going on a world tour!), but which have since become commonplace, can look a bit old-fashioned. The reader does need to get into the Wayback Machine and return to a time when we weren't so jaded. (Not to mention a time with no cellphones!)

This was a caper novel with a difference, and the difference was in the inner workings of the minds of the main characters. The characters of McBride and Pope Martin both have very scrupulous consciences and we see a lot of their inner struggles going on. Cleary also delves into the other characters, from the impoverished Italian aristocrat to the Aussie tunneler with a criminal past, so that each of them is believable and engaging, or at least we can see where they're coming from. I can't speak to the accuracy of Cleary's depiction of Rome and the Vatican, never having been there, but it certainly seemed real, with enough details to transport the reader without reading like a guidebook. I would have no doubt that this was certainly one of the best books of the year.

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