British publishers William Collins Sons & Co. routinely produced great cover art, which was usually attributed, but not this time. This front for John Davies’ exotic adventure See Naples and Die, which came in 1961, has the familiar look of a couple of suspects, but we won’t guess who painted it.
It made us decide to read the book—that and the great title, which is so good, in fact, that numerous authors have used it. There’s a reason. The phrase, which in Italian is “Vedi Napoli e poi muori,” was once a common expression. It’s said to be rooted in a Neapolitan fairy tale about a witch named Raziella, but was made famous beyond Italy when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used it to express his feelings about Naples, basically popularizing an eighteenth century equivalent of the modern phrase, “I can die now.”
In See Naples and Die a Scottish launch captain and smuggler named Bruce Blair ferries Swedish beauty Meya Nordstrom from La Goleta, Tunisia to Naples, along with a full complement of cargo and passengers. He finds it odd that she’s taking his uncomfortable vessel rather than a plane or cruise liner, but smugglers don’t ask questions. He and Meya make a connection—tenuous, but enough for her to invite Blair to drop by her villa sometime. He does that the next week and finds—to his shock and horror—that Meya is the mistress of the kingpin of Naples, a slick U.S. born gangster named Leonardo Volpi. She’d taken Blair’s boat to bait him to the villa. In short order Volpi strongarms Blair into a salvage operation that could have deadly consequences.
In the balance between sheer writing skill and creative vision, some writers are gifted with both, but Davies, though a perfectly adequate technician, is mostly in the latter category. His Tunisia/Italy setting, with its grimy dockside environs juxtaposed against the hillside villas of the wealthy and the angelically beautiful Meya, augment a tale that’s been churned out by hundreds of authors. His Naples and Tunis details are vivid, the dark and desperate mood he constructs is compelling, and his story has enough action to propel readers forward. And it didn’t escape us that referring to Meya several times as a witch was a subtle hint that Davies had in mind the fairytale witch Raziella.
As a side note, Davies (who by the way isn’t the famous Welsh historian) uses this construction a lot: “He’d got to.” That’s as in, “He’d got to do something about it,” instead of, “he had to do something about it.” We’d never seen it before, and thought it was strange. You learn something every time you read a book. Well, we’d got to read another book from Davies. Did we use that correctly? Probably not. Doesn’t matter, because we aren’t planning to ever use it again. We’re not British, so we’d sound like posers. Read Naples and enjoy.
