Only now at the end do you truly understand

I think a lot about the talkie denouement. I like the device. My favourite structure is weird event / maze of weirdness / long explanation. In a good novel part three is self-evident. In another type of good novel the reader would never be able to see anything until it was explained. The Hotel of the Three Roses by Augusto De Angelis (Pushkin Vertigo) was published in 1936 and there is a lot of talk in it, almost all of which takes place in the same hotel room. Spaces are meticulously mapped out and the plot is peeled back from many angles but mostly people chat. (It doesn't hurt that they're Italian. European characters talk to the author: New Zealanders just nod.) The first of 20 Inspector De Vincenzi mysteries, it was published by Mondadori whose yellow-jacketed editions lent their name to the Giallo tradition of Italian movies and novels. At the end the crime is solved, or at least deconstructed in preparation for a second read. The resolution is gothic. You don't need hindsight to glimpse Mussolini in its shadows.