the taint of midas by anne zouroudi

Times Literary Supplement 19 december 2008

Hermes Diaktoros, the hero of Anne Zouroudi’s second novel, is a likeable sleuth. In Zouroudi’s first book, The Messenger of Athens (2007), he investigated the fatal effects of lust; here, he is concerned with greed. Zouroudi gives her lead character enough quirks to ensure continuity throughout a planned series of crime novels that will deal with the seven deadly sins. Her hero has pristine shoes, in the way that Morse has his Wagner and Sherlock Holmes has his pipe.

The “fat man”, as Hermes is always described, has elsewhere been compared to a Greek Poirot; Hermes, however, is a more sensual, less cerebral creature than Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective. Even the slogan of his favourite brand of cigarettes bears this out: “The cigarette for the man who knows a real smoke”. Hermes is nonetheless as mysterious as most fictional sleuths.

It is his mission here, in modern Arcadia in the Pelopnnese, to unravel the circumstances leading to the death of his friend, the beekeeper Gabrilis. The old man had looked after the Temple of Apollo, where he had a smallholding, for over half a century but he had been forced to sign away his interest a few hours before his death. Hermes’s first action in the novel is to chance upon the battered body of his friend by a dusty roadside. It turns out that there are many who could gain from the death of Gabrillis, among them rapacious developers who are threatening Arcadia’s most ancient sites; Hermes must prove this in order to clear his own name, for he is immediately cast as the main suspect by police. He is aided in his investigations by a host of charming characters, including Sostis, a barber who always deals with exactly twelve customers a day, so that he can spend the rest of his day fishing.

While Zouroudi has a lightness of touch, she is unflinching in her condemnation of corruption, and a sticky end is meted out to those, and there are many of them in this novel, who are in thrall to Mammon. There is realistic horror in The Taint of Midas but Hermes, operating as a kind of deus ex machina, dispenses his own particular brand of justice.

This review first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement