The Italian Secret
Tara Moss, Penguin
Tara Moss first penned her way onto international bestseller lists with her debut 1999 crime novel Fetish and has remained a regular on them ever since. She has now penned 15 bestsellers, including two non-fiction works and her latest novel The Italian Secret, and is published in 19 countries and 12 languages.
The Italian Secret, the third in her hugely popular, superbly crafted post-World War 2 mystery series featuring war reporter turned private investigator (PI) Billie Walker, is already a number one Amazon bestseller. For Moss, her fictional PI grew out of her fascination with the war and the strong women of the era. “She’s really an amalgam of all those incredible women I’ve admired, for as long as I can remember. Real-life women like Nancy Wake, Martha Gellhorn, Lee Miller and Virginia Hall.”
Moss, a dual Australian-Canadian citizen, remains heavily in thrall to the WW2 period, she explains: ”I have that personal family connection which most of us have. But for me, it was listening to my Oma and Opa, my Dutch grandparents on my mother’s side.” When her grandfather, a baker, was taken by the Nazis from a small Dutch town to labour in a munitions factory in Berlin, her grandmother rode to Berlin, bringing him flour and sugar smuggled inside the hollows of her bicycle. By baking bread for his Nazi captors, he secured a day pass. Moss recounts: “He fled into a field and managed to walk through fields at night, all the way back home. But that extraordinary resilience and the clever ways in which people found to survive and to help each other is what really made me want to write this series.”
Dedicated to her grandfather, The Italian Secret is set largely in 1948, and although it follows the earlier novels in the series, The War Widow and The Ghosts of Paris, it can be read as a standalone. It moves between Sydney — where Billie, having returned from her stint as a war reporter in Paris, has re-opened her father’s private investigation agency — and Naples, where she eventually goes to unravel the secret behind a stash of letters hidden in her father’s desk. Yet this is only one thread in the complex narrative weave that distinguishes The Italian Secret. Along with murder, revenge and war, it touches on themes of misogyny and domestic violence as well as the plight of disabled WW2 veterans, who found themselves unemployable after the war.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more compelling female PI in the genre than Billie Walker, who like Moss herself, is a kind of advocate for the rights of women and children, and hosts open house on Sundays for women at risk needing advice and help. For Moss, she says, it is merely an example of the sort of thing she sees a lot of women doing when they have a little bit of power: “They don’t need to have a lot of power, but they take the power that they have and they put it back into community in a way that’s really beautiful.”
Similarly her characterisation of the fellow agents Walker employs in her agency, Wiradjuri woman Shyla, and Sam, a disabled veteran, speak to the times. “It’s very realistic that these people would be working with Billie because they have their own set of skills and they’re also in a time and an economy where it wasn’t easy to get work. Sam doesn’t mind taking orders from a woman, and because he’s lost most of one hand to an Italian thermos bomb, he’s no use to the army anymore, so far as the army is concerned. And what Billie’s offering, strange as the work may be sometimes like crawling around back alleys and doing some pretty dangerous stuff, is exciting work. But it’s also a paying job at a time when they did not treat people very well when they returned with disabilities from the war, and that,” she adds, “is still the case”.
Moss says choosing Naples as a setting was an intentional choice: “I wanted to show the way regular civilians in Italy and Naples in particular were impacted. After having been bombed by the Allies, they swapped sides, and then were hit by the Nazis, and then Mount Vesuvius erupted [in 1944]. It was devastating, and think that’s a part of historical fiction that we often overlook. We don’t see stories told about the war impacting countries that weren’t allied countries, everyone else gets written out of the picture.”
Not that Moss has ever been a slouch when it comes to research. She not only immersed herself in the history of Naples and its backstreets, but in the labyrinthine tunnels of its Sotterranea (underground). Dating back to the third century BCE when the Greeks opened the first underground quarries to build the walls and temples of Neapolis [Naples] with the volcanic porous rock known as tufa, these tunnels were used as air-raid shelters during WW2. For Moss: “They are so filled with memory and the energetic and psychic imprint of the experiences of the civilian population in Naples that I just had to go there and touch the walls and experience it, in so much as you can, 80+ years later.”
In the course of writing her novels, Moss has also earned her PI credentials, toured the FBI academy at Quantico, passed the Los Angeles police department firearms training, conducted surveillance, and attended many criminology conferences. She has also maintained a 26-year friendship with Dr Robert Hare, one of the world’s leading experts on psychopathy. But it’s her own first-hand experience with violence and disability that lends such authenticity to her fiction and to her advocacy.
She has been a Unicef ambassador since 2007, and in 2014 was recognised for outstanding advocacy for her blog Manus Island: An insider’s Report, which helped break news about the alleged murder of an Iranian asylum-seeker in Australia’s immigration camp. In 2015, she revealed she had been raped in her early 20s, and that same year she was punched by a man, a complete stranger, in Sydney’s CBD. She’s never shied away from speaking about it publicly: ”I always have this hope that my advocacy in the area of violence against women and girls will become redundant and unnecessary. Some things are changing, but the problem is still as prevalent as always, and that’s disturbing. It’s not the world that I want for my daughter and anyone else.”
She makes no apology for touching on the darker side of domestic violence in this series. “I don’t think I can write a crime series without touching on one of the most prevalent forms of crime. I wanted to approach the subject with care, and that is something Billie brings – a sense of style, a kind of resilience, and joie de vivre. But I do need to touch on those subjects. It’s an unspoken contract I have with my readers, in particular with this series, that you’re going to make it through to the other side, and although I’m going to touch on difficult things, it will never be more than you can handle. That was a very intentional choice for me for this series.”
Moss doesn’t shrink either from speaking of the decade of her life lost to complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), an extremely rare pain disorder which was triggered by a 2016 hip injury, and saw her first compelled to use a walking stick, then a walking frame, and ultimately a wheelchair. Explains Moss: “CRPS rates above childbirth without anaesthetic or amputation of a digit without anaesthetic on the McGill pain scale, and it’s a 24/7 pain. It took on a form of cold burning, and spread from the hip to the full leg, and then the full right side of my body. It’s very hard to be in a body in so much pain for those years, and it impacted my life on every imaginable level.”
Now aged 52, Moss went into remission three years ago. “I’m not overstating it when I say it feels like a miracle every day because I’m again able to travel, to do a book tour, meet people, walk around, walk in heels even, which I thought was never going to happen again. So I feel pretty darned lucky.” She remains an active disability advocate and was given an honorary citizen award by the City of Victoria for her work on accessibility rights which she insists “is still very patchy and problematic. So I wanted to make sure that I touched on the experience of disability in the series, because it’s the experience of so much of our community. None of us is untouched by violence or disability in our lives.”
Tara Moss on the books that most influenced her
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of Virginia Hall, WW2’s Most Dangerous Spy, by Sonia Purnell
This fascinating book about Virginia Hall is one of the better tellings of her extraordinary real-life story. Hall was initially thwarted in her efforts to become a foreign diplomat because she had lost a leg in a hunting accident, and the US state department discriminated against people with disabilities. Despite this, she went on to be one of the most fearless and decorated spies of WW2, all while using a prosthetic leg she named ‘Cuthbert’. Along with Lee Miller, Nancy Wake and Martha Gellhorn, Hall is one of the inspirations for my historical fiction character, Billie Walker.
Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood
The late Australian great Kerry Greenwood introduced her 1920s private detective Phyrne Fisher in this novel, helping to shape the way I think about the possibilities of a crime series and a heroine. Greenwood’s Phryne is a social justice warrior, a feminist heroine, and a woman who knows how to mix business and pleasure. She is now known to a wider audience thanks to the Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries series.
Wild Soul Runes by Lara Vesta
A book of a more esoteric nature, Wild Soul Runes was part of my introduction to the Elder Futhark, and Anglo-Saxon and Northumbrian runes that are now a part of my everyday life. In addition to my work as an author, I teach courses each year on the runes, and Lara’s work was a thoughtful, soulful introduction to the runes used by my direct Norse and Anglo Saxon ancestors.
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us by Dr Robert D. Hare
Dr Hare was a massive influence in my first crime series with Mak Vanderwall, and meeting him at his psychopathy lab at the University of British Columbia was one of my first breakthrough research experiences in my early twenties. I published my first novel, Fetish the following year. Without Conscience explores the reality of the psychopaths among us.
On Writing by Stephen King
I was reading Stephen King novels by the time I was 10, getting them from the local library and reading them with a flashlight under my covers. King was the reason I first wanted to be a novelist, so it was with delight that I found he had published a book on writing years later, when I was working on my second novel. Part memoir, and filled with advice for young writers, On Writing had a great influence on me at the time.
