Book Review : Mystery With a Dash of Culture Clash

Summer’s Lease by John Mortimer (Viking: $19.95: 288 pages)

This is the book to pack if your summer plans include a visit to Tuscany; the one to console you if you’re going no further than Will Rogers Park; required reading for everyone whose fantasies center upon newly remodeled Italian farmhouses within easy reach of Florence.

Molly Pargeter belongs in the last group. Mother of three daughters, wife of one reluctant solicitor, all of whom would just as soon spend the holidays in dear old England, she’s unable to resist the lure of an item in the classified section--”Villa to let near small Tuscan town. Suit couple, early 40s, with three children. (Females preferred).”

An ardent admirer of Renaissance art, Molly has dreamed of just such an adventure ever since her school days, and this particular notice seems written with the Pargeters in mind. She, Hugh and the girls fill the bill exactly. Even though her eccentric journalist father loses no time in inviting himself along, after a quick reconnoitering trip to view the villa, Molly is sure La Felicita can stretch to accommodate them all.

Specific Instructions

The lease is no sooner signed than the instructions arrive--considerably more specific and fussy than the usual haphazard memo stuck to the refrigerator of a summer rental, but Molly welcomes the precision. La Felicita, after all, is leagues above your average mildewed seaside cottage. She’s eager to be a model tenant, never running more than one major appliance at a time, taking short showers, even dining formally by candlelight on the terrace, exactly as ordered by their landlord, the seigniorial S. Kettering.

Though all these mandates are signed with that name, no one in the village’s sizable English colony seems to know their lessor’s whereabouts or is able to remember when he was last seen. His detailed instructions, however, have made settling in easier than Molly expected; the gorgeous setting beguiling Hugh, the pool winning over the two older girls, and the otherwise incommunicative maid Giovanna an instant hit with 3-year-old Jacqueline. The villa even comes with a facilitator, an expatriate Englishman who knows where to find everything from rough-cut marmalade to shuttlecocks. With this obliging Mr. Fixit on call, no one except Molly gives S. Kettering a second thought, and then only after a series of decidedly curious occurrences have roused her apprehension.

One day, browsing through the collection of art books provided by Kettering, Molly finds a list of assets and liabilities that seems to have been prepared by a spouse contemplating a divorce, though there are no clues to which Kettering might have written it. Molly’s interest is piqued, and her pique takes various more serious forms as the summer progresses.

Serio-Comic Mystery

The swimming pool mysteriously drains, the Tuscan tranquillity is shattered by the apparent suicide of an English resident, a strange message is hand-delivered to the house, and one of the absent Kettering children suddenly turns up in the neighborhood. Considered together, these incidents are clear omens that “Summer’s Lease” is not only an erudite and incisive social satire on innocents abroad, but the kind of serio-comic mystery at which Mortimer excels.

The author of the addictive British TV series, “Rumpole of the Bailey,” as well as an impressive assortment of novels, plays, essays and translations, the author is supremely qualified to make the most of this promising material. Molly’s father, a lecherous elderly columnist, is a particularly fine creation, his meticulously crafted Italian diary a wonderful parody of a uniquely English sort of personal journalism--quaint, witty and curmudgeonly--not much in demand these days, but once a staple of every newspaper.

Though the mystery itself might seem a bit mild and predictable to jaded aficionados of the genre, the deft characterizations of the Pargeters and the tart portraits of their less winsome fellow countrymen are supremely diverting. The accurate information on the various charms of the Tuscan countryside is an added bonus; the culture clash between the naive, no-nonsense Brits and the shrewd, dolce far niente villagers lending even more brio to theconcoction.