Cosi Fan Tutti

Michael Dibdin

You wait ages for an Italian detective series to be penned in the English language and then two come along together. That's how it seemed in the 1990s when Michael Dibdin and Donna Leon both started churning out their Italian based thrillers.

Whereas Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti is rarely allowed to stray from his Veneto base, Dibdin has his character, Aurelio Zen, pop up all over Italy. Cosi' Fan Tutte finds Zen in Naples, demoted and lethargic, running the lowly port police but otherwise generally enjoying himself. This being Naples a certain amount of contraband is flowing smoothly in and out of port but so long as the cops keep their smuggling operations, together with the seamen's brothel they run on the top floor of the police station, within reasonable limits, Zen's duties are light. That's until a foreign sailor is involved in a knife fight in the port area and turns out to be carrying a mysterious package.

In the meantime Zen is amusing himself by playing the Don Alfonso role from Mozart's opera. Only in this case, the two lovers whose fidelity will be tested, are two young men from the Neapolitan underworld. And their lovers two sisters from a well-to-do family. Zen packs the sisters off on a foreign trip, stirs the pot by introducing the men to a couple of Albanian prostitutes the minute the ladies have left town and sits back to await developments. Meanwhile, an extremist political group - "strade pulite" - are bumping off prominent Neapolitan crooks while disguised as bin men. Don't you smell a rat as soon as you see bin men actually working the streets of Naples? But Zen is also busy befriending a Naples born lady taxi driver whose ex-husband was born in Hackney, giving Dibdin the excuse, outrageously, to squeeze the "Rozzers", the "Filth" and "zee Old Bill" into a single Italian-accented sentence. It's complicated, but no more complicated than your average opera.

And it's opera, of course, that Michael Dibdin is playfully imitating. You get the impression he got slightly tired of the Zen format and decided to lark around this time. A bit like those American sitcoms which go a bit stale and the writers try and freshen it up by having a whole episode produced in rhyming couplets, or in song, or in drag.

By the way, the title, "Cosi' Fan Tutte", in Mozart's original, translates rather awkwardly as "Thus Are All Women". Believe me, it sounds better in Italian. But Dibdin himself points out, in his afterword, "while the title of the opera is gender-specific, the masculine form "tutti" spares no one."