How could there not be a lot of crime in Monaco – a tightly packed nest of wealth, sex and power all in the sunshine of the Riviera. Officially the Principality of Monaco, with its main conurbation being Monte Carlo, set between France and Italy on the Mediterranean. Roughly 40,000 residents of whom about 10,000 are Monégasque nationals, the rest mostly rich people – seriously rich people, incredibly rich people – and, of course, those who serve them (in all the ways you can imagine crime fans!). Unsurprisingly Monaco is considered a global hub of money laundering so one would think the crime would be mostly white collar rather than grubby street violence. Let’s see…and be warned, if you don’t like excessive wealth, this Crime and the City contains rather a lot of casinos, nightclubs, champagne and private yachts.
The late Philip Kerr, he of the Bernie Gunther Berlin cop series, wrote a standalone novel, Research (2021). In a luxury flat in Monaco, John Houston, the world’s bestselling thriller writer, finds his supermodel wife in bed with a bullet in her skull. Now the man who has invented hundreds of bestselling killings is wanted for a real murder and on the run from the police, his life transformed into something out of one of his books. And, in London, his ghost-writer has some questions. The late Kerr was always spot in with his novels, both series and standalones – the press described this one as ‘Hitchcockian’.
James Patterson and David Ellis travel to Monaco in Guilty Wives. Sitting in a dark, dank prison cell in Paris, serving a life sentence for murder, Abbie Elliot tries to piece together the story of how she came to be there. It all happened in Monte Carlo, where she was having the holiday of a lifetime with her three best friends away from their stifling lives, and husbands. Writing by numbers? Well, yes. But fun if you’re on a beach or, perhaps, a Monte Carlo balcony.
Modern Monaco may be a haven for rather blingy cash these days – those impounded Russian oligarch yachts, Middle Eastern money launderers, slightly dubious cartel – or East European – gang-like gents. But it was always a place to attract the desperate, the slightly dodgy, the conmen and the chancers. After all didn’t someone once break the bank of Monte Carlo – they did indeed (as the song goes…). Charles Deville Wells broke the bank at Monte Carlo – not once but ten times – winning the equivalent of millions in today’s money. He followed up with a colossal bank fraud in Paris, and became Europe’s most wanted criminal, hunted by British and French police and known in the press as ‘Monte Carlo Wells – the man with 36 aliases’. Robin Quinn’s The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo: Charles De Ville Wells, Gambler and Fraudster Extraordinaire (2016) tells his story. Talking of true crime there’s also Michael Sheridan’s Murder in Monte Carlo (2011) set in 1907 when a trunk on the Monte Carlo to Marseille train is discovered to contain the dismembered body of a woman in it. The police arrested a man and a woman in a nearby hotel for questioning – Vere Thomas St Leger Goold, an Irishman, and his French wife Marie Violet Giroudain. Goold is an aristocrat from Cork in Ireland who was once a Wimbledon finalist. But why would he kill a woman in Monte Carlo and stuff her in a luggage trunk.
Grim, but also linked to money. Money of course can be nouveau, gauche, unearned, criminal. But it was also often, back in the Jazz Age and before, intensely glamorous. Martha Bond’s Murder in Monaco – Lottie Sprigg Travels 1920s Cozy Mystery Series Book 4 is all that era. Lottie (and her dog Rosie) arrives in glitzy Monaco where she finds a mysterious note which threatens murder. Before she can act on it, a body is found in a private room at the Monte Carlo Casino.
And a few classics set in Monaco.
–Agatha Christie’s (lesser known) short story collection The Mysterious Mr Quin (1930) features a series of tales with the characters of Mr Satterthwaite, a socialite, and the eponymous Mr Quin who appears almost magically at opportune moments. The stories tend to take place, as Satterthwaite is a socialite, in glamorous settings. In The Soul of the Croupier Mr Satterthwaite is in Monte Carlo, meets his old friend Countess Czarnova, her companion a young mid-western American man, Franklin Rudge, and the innocent and naïve Elizabeth Martin. As (if you’ve read any of the stories) you’d expect, Mr Quin then appears. As they all gamble in the casino the story flashes back to the depredations of the First World War, a casino croupier Pierre Vaucher, and who does and who doesn’t really have any money.
–Graham Greene’s novella Loser Takes All (1955) was, said Greene himself rather disingenuously, not at all intended to encourage “adultery, the use of pyjama tops, or registry office weddings. Nor is it meant to discourage gambling.” All things Greene enjoyed of course. there’s a wedding and a honeymoon in Monte Carlo, a private yacht (yes, Monte Carlo has always been home to lots of private yachts on which people get murdered), money lending and gambling. Greene’s moral? winning at the casino doesn’t guarantee happiness (though personally I’d give it a go).
–Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo is a spy thriller from the once much read (but now not much thought of) E Phillips Oppenheim. A Londoner, Oppenheim appeared on the cover of Time in 1927 and inspired the much better remembered John Buchan to write. Oppenheim wrote Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo in 1915 and takes place in Monte Carlo involving Russian aristocracy. Oppenheim set several other novels in Monaco. He liked it there and, fortunately for him, sold enough books to be able to visit regularly.
And finally, it’s wonderful to get to finally Giorgio Falleti, a legendary Italian writer from Piedmont but who lived on the island of Elba. A musician, actor and comedian who is only occasionally translated into English unfortunately. He published his first crime novel, I Kill, in 2002 and it sold four million copies (despite being a whopping doorstop of a novel at over 600 pages)! A killer announces his crimes in advance on the radio and at the scene of each crime are the words ‘I Kill’ scrawled in the victim’s blood. A detective and an FBI agent, Frank Ottobre, work together to track him down to Monte Carlo where so many rather shady international characters reside.
