Ryan Murdock’s A Sunny Place for Shady People: How Malta Became One of the Most Curious and Corrupt Places in the World feels like two short books housed inside a single cover. The first two sections, “Island Life” and “Strange Crimes,” recount the author and his wife’s move to Malta. Initially, the attractions of the small island nation seem ample. Life is relatively cheap; in summer, there is swimming in the warm waters of the Mediterranean; it’s conveniently located for traveling to other parts of Europe; and, importantly for a writer, it is a “place that hadn’t been written about so I could contribute something new.”
Indeed, Murdock does a superb job of bringing Malta to life, even if it’s primarily to debunk his initial illusions about the place. Among the numerous annoyances of life on the island are the frequent shooting off of ear-splitting fireworks, the omnipresent Maltese stink eye, the lack of education among the general populace, the crumbling infrastructure, the “winter storms [that] lashed at the coasts, bringing fierce winds that tore at the houses and ferocious green waves that ripped chunks of stone from the cliffs and hurled them into the sea,” and, above all, the ingrained lawlessness of the citizenry. Before long, Murdock begins taking a “secret delight in doing absolutely anything I wanted without fear of punishment. I ran red lights in front of cops. I drove as fast as congested traffic would allow. I swerved madly, mounted curbs, slalomed around lampposts, and cut off other drivers at every opportunity, before they could do the same to me.” Murdock tells his wife he is just “going local,” but he acknowledges that “in behaving this way I became what I pretended to despise.”
Section three, simply entitled “Daphne,” begins what feels like the second book. Daphne is Daphne Caruana Galizia, a courageous political blogger intent on rooting out governmental corruption. She goes by a single name in Malta because everyone knows who she is. Feared, hated, and secretly admired, Daphne is the hero of the second half of A Sunny Place for Shady People, and it is to Murdock’s credit that he spends so much time documenting the many illegalities she uncovered, and the multitude of ways those in power tried to shut her down.
Sections four and five, “Point of No Return” and “The Wages of Sin,” delve even deeper into her story. We learn about the detailed planning that went into Daphne’s 2017 assassination in a brutal car bombing that scattered her body parts across the landscape, the subsequent arrests of the bombers, and the Maltese government’s desperate attempts to keep the killing from being blamed on any of the higher-ups whom Murdock clearly believes ordered the hit. Alas, the guilty succeeded: “At the time of this writing, no politicians have been charged in connection with the murder.”
How did all this happen in an EU country? Murdock narrates Malta’s long history of piracy and criminality. And he learns that getting away with things and taking advantage of other people is seen not only as a person’s right, but an obligation. In fact, Italian political scientist Luca Ranieri categorizes Malta not as a mafia state or a failed state, but as a success story where “economic and political elites seem to look at the proliferation of victimless forms of crime such as money laundering and fuel smuggling less as a threat than as an opportunity.” What makes this possible in large measure is “amoral familism,” which Murdock describes as “a world of nested hierarchies,” with the “true bedrock, the foundations stone of Maltese culture,” being “my family versus everyone else.”
I enjoyed both of what I am calling the two short books housed under the title A Sunny Place for Shady People. On balance, though, the first “book” was more vivid, lively, and accessible. The final 150 pages, about the murder and outrageously inept prosecution of Daphne Caruana Galizia, represents an important piece of reportage, but towards the end, I felt overwhelmed by the facts and figures; the names of the malefactors and their shell corporations and their labyrinthine skullduggery all begin to blend together. Nevertheless, would I recommend this book to someone interested in knowing more about Malta? Mhux hekk. Of course!
This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.
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