Silence in the presence of evil

“ALIBI,” Joseph Kanon’s new novel of crime and consequence, is set in Venice, Italy, less than a year after the end of World War II, a historic milestone that apparently weighs heavily in the author’s mind. His fiction debut, “Los Alamos,” took place in the waning days of the war, involving a mysterious murder that threatened the Manhattan Project. Though his second book, “The Prodigal Spy,” moved on to the HUAC witch hunts of the 1950s and beyond, his third, “The Good German,” returned to the postwar period.

That 2001 novel played out in a bombed and battered Germany, which is where “Alibi’s” young protagonist, Adam Miller, has been attached to a military unit charged with ferreting out war criminals, or, as he puts it, “separating the wicked from the merely acquiescent.” He’s only weeks away from mustering out when his socialite mother invites him to Venice, where she has taken residence, prompted, he presumes, by memories of better days when she and his late father “idled away afternoons on the Lido” in the company of other affluent pre-jet-setters such as Linda and Cole Porter.

Moving from a ravaged Frankfurt -- its camps “full of corpses, wheeled out in farm carts to mass graves,” kids “eating out of PX garbage cans,” women “passing bricks hand over hand, digging out” -- to a physically unscathed, party-hearty Venice does little to dissipate Adam’s war-weariness. His mood darkens when he discovers that his mother is thinking of marrying a local doctor whom she’s known since the old days.

Though Gianni Maglione is a respected healer as well as a Venetian aristocrat with “doges in his family,” Adam suspects that beneath his exquisitely tailored dinner jacket beats the cold heart of a gigolo. This concern becomes almost insignificant when, in the sort of coincidence one rarely finds in fiction these days, the former Nazi hunter’s new Jewish-Italian girlfriend (via love-at-first-sight at a palazzo party), recognizes Maglione as the Nazi quisling responsible for the death of her father.

Somewhat impetuously, Adam not only prevails upon his Army associates to look into the doctor’s background, he also accuses his prospective stepfather of being a fascist and a fortune hunter. These actions eventually lead to several murders and the fulfillment of Adam’s destiny as the sort of bona fide noir hero suggested by the book’s title.

Kanon, who for many years was a publishing executive, is an elegant stylist whose novels have been compared to those of Graham Greene and John le Carre. Indeed, “Alibi” seems tinted by at least one shade of Greene. The youthful and naive Adam, trying to force his self-righteous beliefs on a culture he fails to understand, is not unlike Greene’s “Quiet American” Alden Pyle whose efforts in Saigon met with similarly, if not exactly, disastrous results.

Greene was fond of Saigon, however, and since the ox he was goring was (in his perception) America’s unwarranted interference in the politics of Vietnam, Pyle was that book’s antagonist, observed in all his unwavering dedication to democracy by the novel’s narrator-protagonist, a cynical, burned-out British war correspondent named Fowler.

Kanon’s tale lacks even that dubious a moral center. The only voice is that of its not-so-quiet American, Adam, who is disdainful of Venice’s centuries-old tradition of burying its scandals and sins in the deepest sections of its grand canal and equally critical of the expatriates flashing their fabulous wealth in the sunken-cheeked faces of the impoverished locals. In his callow self-involvement, he finds fault in everything and nearly everyone, but falls suddenly silent when it comes to his monumental failings.

Even at the end, when all the truths are told and all the crimes have been accounted for, by truth or lie, he seems unwilling to acknowledge any guilt for the major role he has played in creating the chaos. In lieu of remorse, we get only regret and bitterness. “Alibi,” with its beautifully crafted prose, clever dialogue, smartly rendered time and place and moments of high suspense, is missing one crucial element -- a protagonist with enough self-awareness to make him worth the splendid literary trappings.

Dick Lochte is a critic of crime fiction and author of the suspense thriller “Sleeping Dog.”