La Dolce Morte by Mikel J. Koven

Author:Mikel J. Koven [Koven, Mikel J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2006-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

Suspects

All good murder mysteries must have an array of suspects, and in part, this is one of those facets of the giallo that separates it from the slasher film—in the giallo, the killer must interact with the other characters without murdering them, whereas in the slasher film, the killer is always killing—like Irving Wallace in Stagefright. In many cases, the amateur detective, too, is one of the suspects, if not the prime one, and as I noted above, this would be one factor in the amateur detective’s obsession with solving the mystery—clearing his or her name. Other times, the amateur detective’s significant other may be a suspect, and the motivation is to clear that person’s name. Other frequently used suspects include relatives of the victims (The Case of the Bloody Iris, Autopsy, and My Dear Killer); relatives of the amateur detective (The Black Belly of the Tarantula, Autopsy, and Eyeball); and the local handyman (A Blade in the Dark, Autopsy, and Dont Torture a Duckling), who in giallo cinema seems to have replaced the butler from the literary tradition of murder mysteries.

From the literary origins of the giallo cinema comes what I have called “the murder mystery plot,” which, like most Agatha Christie novels and the like, features an array of suspects, all with their own motives for the murder(s) (Blood and Black Lace, Five Dolls for an August Moon, The Fifth Cord, The Bloodstained Shadow, The Iguana with a Tongue of Fire, The Pyjama Girl Case, and My Dear Killer). Related to the murder mystery plot is a slightly more cinematic variant, wherein rather than being told what a character’s motive might be in committing these murders (a highly literary device), we see those motivations demonstrated, as in Black Belly of the Tarantula, The New York Ripper, Who Saw Her Die? and Seven Blood Stained Orchids. My Dear Killer reveals the indebtedness of the giallo to the work of Agatha Christie and the classic period of detective fiction quite explicitly: at the denouement of the film, Inspector Peretti gathers the members of the extended Moroni family together in a single room of their mansion and outlines the solution to the crime, much like Hercule Poirot does in the Christie mysteries. He all but says “one of you is a murderer.” As Martin Priestman noted in characterizing this kind of murder mystery,

With the Christie-style whodunit, the emphasis shifts from the brilliant detective’s following-up of clues through a range of territories, to the successive investigation of the stories and half-truths of a reasonably large group of suspects, immobilized in place and, effectively, in time. To maintain our interest in them, it is important that each suspect should have, or appear to have “something to hide”: usually a less important crime, an unacknowledged sexual or other relationship, a desire to protect another party, or some other private obsession. (1998: 20)

Based on the nature of the killer’s disguise, we are often given visual clues as to who among the suspects the killer is.

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