The novel takes place in Rome, and concerns a number of murders among a group of tourists visiting the city; much of the action takes place in the "Basilica di San Tommaso".
Synopsis
British author Barnaby Grant, vacationing in Rome, has just completed a difficult novel. When his briefcase containing the manuscript is stolen, Sebastian Mailer, a British tour guide, returns it. Mailer claims he tracked the thief down using his knowledge of Rome's criminal underworld, and apologises for not returning the manuscript sooner, citing his cocaine addiction. When Grant offers to repay him, Mailer produces his own story which he’d like Grant's opinion on. Grant, delighted at having his manuscript back, gets slightly drunk and Mailer suggests they embark on an 'adventure'.
Next year, Grant returns to Rome after his book's successful publication. He sees Mailer in a hotel lobby and leaves abruptly, embarrassed by dim recollections of their evening together. Then, ashamed, he returns to speak to Mailer, who takes him aside.
Two weeks later, Alleyn is in Rome, liaising with the local Questore, Valdarno, about Mailer's drug-smuggling ring; looking into Mailer's tour, he is surprised to see the distinguished Grant working as 'Guest of Honour'. He books himself a tour and meets other members of the group: a Dutch couple, Baron and Baroness Van der Veghel; Sophy Jason, a children's author; Lady Sonia Braceley, an erstwhile society beauty ravaged by years of high living; the Hon. Kenneth Dorne, her drug-addicted nephew; Major Hamilton Sweet, an ex-military man.
The group arrives at the San Tommaso basilica, where Violetta, a postcard-seller, abuses and spits at Mailer. Beneath the twelfth-century basilica is a third-century church, and beneath this a household from the Flavian period with a Mithraeum. A hole in the floor looks down through the building’s various layers to a stream leading to the Cloaca Maxima.
The group descends below the cloisters, and Sophy thinks she sees Violetta's shadow. Lady Braceley becomes claustrophobic and panics, realising that Kenneth is not with them: Major Sweet escorts her upstairs and Mailer goes off to find Kenneth. Sweet returns, then Kenneth; the Baroness insists that everyone pose for a photo in the Mithraeum, then all members of the party reconvene aboveground, but Mailer is missing.
The Dominican monks at the basilica undertake a search but find nothing. Valdarno is convinced Mailer has recognised Alleyn and fled. Alleyn discovers that Violetta is Mailer's estranged wife and former collaborator in drug-smuggling.
Alleyn persuades Valdarno and the Dominicans to let him search the basilica, where they find Violetta's corpse hidden in a sarcophagus. In Mailer's apartment, Alleyn finds a diary: he was blackmailing Grant, Kenneth and the Van der Veghels. Valdarno assembles the tour-party guests in his office and Alleyn's identity is revealed. Alleyn tries to reconstruct events at the basilica: Sophy recalls hearing the sarcophagus lid being shut while the Baroness was taking her photograph.
Grant confides to Alleyn that Mailer was blackmailing him, having made it appear that Grant had plagiarised Mailer's story. Alleyn overhears Sweet arguing with Mailer's deputy Giovanni: Mailer's and Giovanni's boss has sent Sweet to monitor them, and Sweet is extorting money from Giovanni, who is stealing from their employer.
Kenneth confirms that when he went back upstairs, supposedly to take a photograph, he was meeting Mailer to score drugs. Kenneth went back to rejoin the party but Mailer did not, as he had another appointment to keep.
Alleyn gets a call from the Dominican in charge at the basilica, who suspects that the overwhelming stench there is that of a corpse. The monks lower Alleyn into the well, where he finds Mailer's body.
Valdarno assembles all the suspects in his office, except for Sweet, who has been knocked down by a van while trying to escape. Giovanni gives a statement implicating the now-dead Sweet in the murder of Mailer, who the police accept killed Violetta.
Valdarno is satisfied that this resolves everything; Alleyn is unsure. He has Kenneth's and the Baroness's photographs developed at the police lab. The Baroness's photos of the basilica are exposed and worthless, but Kenneth's photo in the Mithraeum shows the Baron not there. Alleyn conjectures that he slipped out in the near-darkness to meet Mailer with hush-money, found him with Violetta dead at his feet, then murdered him to protect the Baroness. Unable to prove his theory, Alleyn lets the Baron walk free, calling him 'the nicest murderer I have met'.
There is a description of a student demonstration, and Marsh herself witnessed one briefly while in Rome as the guest of New Zealand's ambassador to Italy in summer 1968.[4] She describes this in the 1981 edition of her autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew:
It all seemed, in an odd sort of way, lackadaisical... A group of young men who had been lounging near a motorcycle parked under our windows, half-heartedly turned it over on its side and, after several, unsuccessful attempts, set fire to it and walked away. This was followed by a group of about a hundred young men erupting out of Navona and running down the side street, followed, though not very fast, by some of the police... They did not attempt to arrest anybody and as soon as their non-quarry got to the end of the street and stopped, the police, very sensibly I thought, also stopped and lit cigarettes.[5]
Marsh's biographer Margaret Lewis contrasts the flippancy of this with the severity of the rioting that marred her European trip that summer, and suggests the influence that the political climate had on the novel: "the English upper classes are seen as thoroughly corrupt. Perhaps the heady politics of 1968 were reaching through, and the riot, described so lightly in the second edition of Black Beech and Honeydew, disturbed her more than she wanted to admit".[6]
Marsh based the fictional San Tommaso basilica on Rome's San Clemente al Laterano,[7] something that the New York Times reviewer commented on.[8] The hotel-rooftop garden where Grant broods over the loss of his manuscript was inspired by the roof of the pensione in Florence where Marsh stayed later on the same trip.[9]
Marsh made extensive enquiries into forensic details and Italian police procedure, with which she admitted struggling. On receipt of the manuscript in January 1970, her agent Edmund Cork wrote to her that it was her best novel to date, a verdict with which her American agent agreed.[10]
Reception
H.R.F. Keating wrote a very positive review for The Times, saying that Marsh's novels transcended the limits of genre fiction and reached the status of literature. In the case of When in Rome, he praised the novel's recreation of the Italian capital: "The book is not a puzzle struggling to dominate a setting. It is, shorn of distractions, a novel of place... under the outward appearances there is, pervading all, something suggestively disquieting, a fully evoked unease."[11]
When the novel was published in America by Little, Brown and Company the following year, The New York Times commented on the leisurely and atmospheric opening,[lower-alpha 1] but the review was largely positive. It concluded, "Rome would be the best place to read it, but if an armchair in your living room is all that is available, you can console yourself with this homicidal travelogue."[8]
In 1981, Earl F. Bargainnier cited "the aging sybaritic Lady Sonia Braceley of When in Rome" as one of Marsh's most strikingly grotesque characters.[16] A decade later, Kathryne Slate McDorman called Lady Braceley "one of the most pathetic creatures in Marsh's gallery", but offered a feminist perspective:
she is aware of no other reality beyond the reflection of herself that she sees in men's expressions... She is the final result, the finished product, of one of high society's most vivid nightmares: the wasted woman who has pawned her very soul for the ephemeral rewards of male approval, and who later finds herself bereft of the means to reclaim it.[17]
In a 2002 article on crime fiction set on the peninsula, Susan H. Jayne was dismissive of the book as a whole: "Helen MacInnes's cold war thrillers set in Italy stand up fairly well, but Ngaio Marsh's visit to Fellini's Rome does not."[18]
In 1970–1972, Ngaio Marsh worked on a stage adaptation of the novel with Barbara Toy, but this was never produced.[20][21]
Notes
↑ That Marsh's novels are slow to start is a frequent complaint by critics.[15]
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