There's a moment in one of Natalia Ginzburg's essays where she remarks that to write a tragedy you need to be in excellent spirits, whereas comedy will work best for you when depressed. For all kinds of reasons I felt terminally depressed in 93. In any event, I wrote Mimi's Ghost, the wild sequel to Cara Massimina. The thing that really interested me about murderous Morris Duckworth was not so much his ambition to become Italian (and rich), not so much his ruthlessness when anyone got in the way of that ambition, but his insistence on seeing himself as good at the same time. In short, his piety. He has a great appetite, inspired perhaps by his beer-swilling father, but he also needs his dead mother's regard, he will not be thought of as a villain. It's a kind of moral sensitivity that makes life rather difficult for the criminal. Imagine Richard III if his psychology required that he think of himself as a 'good person'. Mimi's Ghost is a romp, a completely crazy plot. Above all, I was having fun. But when Morris's dead girlfriend, the deeply religious darling he loved and killed, begins to appear to him to tell him how to obtain everything he wants, who to kill and how, then we have the fusion of those two aspects of his character, piety and appetite, welded together in a spectacular psychosis. The latests news is that pretty soon there will at last be a film of Cara Massimina. If it really does come off, I shall get down to a third and last book about Morris, something that I hope will be truly hilarious and terribly serious. And I mean 'terribly'…

and some reviews...

Short takes

'Cara Massimina was a triumph of the darkly-comic-thriller-and-something-more-besides genre. This is an even greater one'
The Daily Telegraph

'A sort of twisted whodunnit… The readability of the book comes from Parks's wonderful and audacious juggling of farcical situations and the way in which Morris's earnest attempts to build a more cultured and just world lead him further and further into slaughter. Hilarious.'
The Financial Times

'Tarantino meets Peter Mayle' (hmm, not so sure about that one…)
The Independent on Sunday

Kissing and killing

Penny Perrick - The Sunday Times, 5 February 1995

Tim Parks's murderous anti-hero, Morris Duckworth, first appeared in an earlier book, Cara Massimina, a sourly macabre entertainment whose style has been compared to Patricia Highsmith's Ripley sequence. In Cara Massimina, Morris dispatched a lecherous Italian and his irritating English lover, as well as Massimina herself, the doting, dim-witted girl whom Morris had kidnapped. Like Tom Ripley, Morris kills for convenience and again, like Highsmith's creation, he is an unabashed bon vivant.
The similarities end there. Ripley is a smooth operator, poised and deft in his dealings with his victims. Morris is a hapless fumbler, a master of bad timing. Ripley is ruthlessly amoral, a hard man. Morris is whingeingly self-justifying, at odds with himself, unnerved by his Lawrentian background (coarse father leerring at him for his poncy fondness for books, martyred mother investing all her love in him before dying prematurely). Morris has none of Ripley's menacing presence; he is a study of the slaughterer as flibbertigibbet, rather like the protagonist of Michael Dibdin's Dirty Tricks.
In Mimi's Ghost, Morris is at it again, kissing and killing, plotting and panicking. No longer an impoverished teacher of English in Verona, he is married to Paola, older sister of the murdered Massimina (Mimmi for short) but as unlike her as tiramisu is to tapioca pudding.
Paola sees Morris for what he is (well almost, she doesn't suspect him of Mimi's murder): a bad lot, in spite of his recently acquired, no-expense-spared polish. She is turned on by the devil within, more spectacularly than Morris, who is as prim as he is perverted, would wish. Disconcerted by his wife's sluttish antics, and being something of a twisted fabulist Morris is soon conjuring up visions of the dead Mimi, last seen being shoved into a refuse sack by one M Duckworth. The ghostly Mimi suggests good works as a shining path to redemption. Morris, not one to shirk from the absorbing task of reinventing himself, becomes kinkily religious, to Paola's derisive amusement, and the unlikely champion of the oppressed, in this case a bunch of African immigrants, illegally sheltering in Verona's cemetery. Morris, giddily sociable and no end of a busybody, finds the men jobs in his in- laws' wine-bottling factory and houses them with a dubious expat English academic. Before you can say Tintoretto, a den of iniquity has begun to flourish.
Parks writes with a brutal, snapping wit. reinventing the crime novel as a capricious, campy romp. Morris, a despicable scoundrel who fancies himself as a latter-day Rupert Brooke, is shockingly convincing as an accidental assassin. Forced to kill his brother-in-law, who has begun to sniff around the circumstances of Mimi's kidnap, Morris thinks, ruefully, "Oh shit! Every time you did this business you had to remember every- thing all over again. Because he wasn't a professional murderer, as in love he could never be a Don Juan Moments later, examining copies of his own ransom demands, be regrets not having asked for more money.
Professional murderer, or just an amateur with attitude, Morris definitely prefers people more dead than alive, one of the reasons why potential murder weapons - a plant pot a paperweight, a chair - slide into his hands so opportunely. Savouring his mother-in-law's demise (strangely enough, from natural causes), "Morris noted how extraordinarily well the coffin blended in with the rest of the room...Perhaps no provincial was truly complete until it had its coffin." And further disturbing musings: "He was an artist in the end, that was his problem: the carnival, the I wake, the nuptial bed. They were all the same to him."
is strewn with the corpses of people who might have come between Morris and his refined mid-afternoon refreshments at the Bar Baglioni. By the end of the book, Morris's handsome face has been chewed to a pulp by a guard dog, but he's as slippery as ever, dodging prosecution through a blend of brio and bluff in one of the funniest trials in fiction, which takes place under an anatomically incorrect frescoed ceiling.
Parks leaves us in little doubt that Morris will carry on killing. As Morris himself bluntly points out: "Anyway, the thing to remember was that however someone was really murdered there was always another completely feasible way in which they might have been, because in the end so many of us have such excellent reasons for wanting to do away with each other." A piece of conclusive reasoning that leaves the reader collapsing into squeamish giggles.

The Italian underbelly

JONATHAN KEATES times Literary Supplement 27 January 1998

Most modern English fiction with an Italian setting has tended to opt for Tuscany or Umbria to furnish suitable backdrops, confident that decor and a few authenticating allusions to works of art and the bloodier vicissitudes of medieval history will do the trick when localizing detail is required. Few of the novelists who use this Chianti-and-frescos formula have ever actually spent long periods in Italy themselves, or sought to investigate the infrastructure of social ritual and traditional prejudice underlying Italian life, let alone absorb the rhythms of daily existence which their presence as tourists scarcely disturbs.
That Tim Parks, so far from being a tourist, had become almost an honorary Italian, was evident from his Iralian Neighbours (1992), the shrewdest of engagements with the subtleties of plain living in a Veneto suburb. His novels, too, have staked out this territory, and their world is recognizably the Bossi and Berlusconi fiefdom: of gloomy chandeliers in the darkened soggiorno; a plastic crucifix on the office wall where the chicken-farmer's nephew is fiddling his tax returns; sex and childbirth on the family's hand-me-down letto matrimoniale; and the aged onorevole Andreotti, still unfingered for his associations with the Mafia. "Italy, it was heartening to think was still that kind of place", reflects Parks's hero, Morris, with no apparent hint of cynicism, after a chastening spell in prison.
Morris plays to its fullest extent that attractive role in which Italian women so often delight to cast Englishmen; eternally amateur, ingenuous, clumsy, incapable of focusing instinct or seizing opportunity, yet always enchanting in his gaucherie and misplaced good intentions. Whether or not he murdered Mimi. the girl who ran away with him in Parks's novel Cara Massimina (to which this is a sequel) scarcely matters - though since Mimi's Ghost transforms him into something along the lines of a serial killer, previous experience undoubtedly comes in handy.
Mimi - a dead hand beside which Mr Casaubon's looks a mere limp wrist - refuses to leave Morris alone. The Blithe Spirit syndrome takes over as her shade becomes his minder, his agent, his manipulator, and, at the end of the book, most bizarre of all her ghostly manifestations, his spiritual director, driving him to crime, sexual anarchy and near-sainthood, all in the name of the inner tranquillity he manages to achieve in the book's closing pages.
"He would accept his mere humanity and live the only way one could; from day to day, from hand to mouth." Such an acceptance is only made possible through a grotesque sequence of comic mishaps which leads Morris to murder, first, his penny-pinching pompous ass of a brother-in-law, Pollo Bobo, and afterwards, his wife, Paola whose obsessively knowing voice with its exasperating habit of calling him Mo we long to throttle.
The surrounding cast - including Hobbes, a benevolent homosexual aesthete and avatar of a more detached British expatriate tradition, and Bobo's wife Antonella, the ultimate good egg with whom Morris reads the Bible on the sofa after supper as part of his redemptive programme - form elements of a drama in several simultaneous modes and keys, brought off with an unfussed accomplishment typical of the author. Social realism, complete with moonlighting Third World migrants and obtuse carabinieri, shades winningly into the black comedy of nocturnal corpse-swapping before something a little more earnestly Catholic in outline takes over. Perhaps the real instruments of Morris's salvation, however, are those we find so compelling in Parks's consistently assured grasp, the muddy cocktail of indulgence and asperity offered by contemporary Italy, and the posthumous glamour of Mimi, irresistible as incubus, siren or tutelary goddess.

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