Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini were a well-known literary duo in Italy for several decades, until Lucentini’s death (by suicide) in 2002. For about forty years they co-wrote newspaper and magazine articles, literary essays, translations (from English and French), and edited numerous anthologies – in particular, of science fiction (for over twenty years they ran the highly influential Urania series for Mondadori). And they published five novels – six, if we include their curious work, The D-Case, in which a group of fictional detectives gather in Rome to discuss and complete Dickens’s unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

The Lover of No Fixed Abode, first published in 1986, is the fourth of their novels and stands out from the others in that it is not primarily a crime story. The other four all have at the heart of their plots a murder case, which needs to be solved. They are all original in their approach to the detective story, and in some cases have solutions that do not abide by the strict rules of the Golden Age crime story, but nonetheless the basic structure is that of the giallo (as crime stories are known in Italy). The Lover, while containing elements of crime fiction (particularly as regards the shady side of the art world), is essentially – as the title suggests – a love story.

The novel, of course, does have a mystery at its heart – and it concerns the identity of the principal character. And here the two authors play strictly fair, scattering plenty of clues throughout the story for attentive readers to pick up. The solution to the mystery leads inexorably to the melancholy conclusion of the love story – which was already implicit in the title of the novel itself.

Many readers find that the novel’s particular charm lies in the brilliant descriptions of Venice. For Fruttero and Lucentini the setting of each of their novels was always crucial. Their first two novels, published in the 1970s, were set in Turin, the city where both writers lived; the books were successfully transferred to the screen (a film in one case and a television series in the other), with Marcello Mastroianni brilliantly playing a Roman detective rather ill at ease in the northern city. Their third novel took place in the medieval city of Siena, against the colourful background of its annual horse race, and their last novel was set in a pine forest on the coast of Tuscany. But in none of these novels does the setting play so crucial role as it does in The Lover.

It has been a truism since at least the eighteenth century, when mass tourism can be said to have begun in Venice, that it is impossible to write anything new about the city. However, Fruttero and Lucentini – who reveal themselves as steeped in the literature of Venice – certainly find new ways of saying the old things. The novel contains some wonderfully evocative descriptions of the city – by night, during a storm, with and without tourists, the grand open spaces of St Mark’s Square, the intimate campielli and calli of Cannaregio and Castello, the interiors of grand palazzi and luxury hotels, back-street bars and little shops.

As translator I have the advantage of having lived in the city for over forty years; this meant that I had no trouble in following the movements of the characters around the city (and place names are very important in this novel, as the detailed index suggests). It also meant that I was able to spot a few minor slips on the authors’ part: for example, cruise ships do not moor alongside the Giardini, as described in Chapter II, and Casanova was not imprisoned in the Palace of the Prisons but in the “Leads” at the top of the Doge’s Palace. But these are trivial points. In general, their descriptions testify to a full awareness of and feeling for the city’s complex history – and this all-pervading sense of the past turns out to be intrinsic to the plot and to its central mystery. See the marvellous paragraph in Chapter XII where the unnamed female narrator muses on the way the male protagonist, whose mysterious identity has at last been revealed, must have seen the city grow…

The principal challenge for the translator of any Fruttero and Lucentini novel is to capture the tone of their prose, often imbued with a subtle irony, which occasionally veers into cutting satire. In this case the main target is the art world and the various absurd characters who inhabit it, whose faults range from pretentious pomposity to sly deviousness or outright criminality. It is, of course, very much a portrait of its time, and some of the language used, even by the more sympathetic characters, may occasionally grate on a contemporary ear.

I hope that this translation has brought across some of the brilliance of the original novel, which, not only in Italy but also in France, Germany and elsewhere, has already been acknowledged as a major contribution to the still vital tradition of non-Venetian literature about Venice – along with works by Shakespeare, Byron, Ruskin, Proust, James, Mann, Hemingway, Pound and others too numerous to list. As already mentioned, it is impossible to write anything new about Venice – but then the same thing could be said about falling in love…