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Pistols! Treason! Murder!: The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy
The year is 1622. Anxiety is high in the city of Venice. Rumors of treason flourish. The noble Antonio Foscarini stands accused and pays the ultimate price. Gerolamo Vano, General of Spies, provides the evidence. But who is really guilty? By the end of the year, Vano is swinging from the gallows in Piazza San Marco, while Foscarini is absolved posthumously. Pistols! Treason! Murder! uncovers the shadowy world of seventeenth-century espionage and the truth behind the most infamous miscarriage of justice in the history of Venice.
Including vividly illustrated comic strips, accounts of the author's bar tour around contemporary Venice, and painstaking detective work, Jonathan Walker’s story of the rise and fall of a master spy is compelling and highly original.
In untangling the career of the master spy Vano, Walker invites the reader into the historian's task of piecing together evidence from incomplete archival sources, making sense of motives, coming to terms with the story, and knowing when the job is done. Aspiring historians will find the methods Walker used to uncover this fascinating story invaluable in their own historical quests.
Including vividly illustrated comic strips, accounts of the author's bar tour around contemporary Venice, and painstaking detective work, Jonathan Walker’s story of the rise and fall of a master spy is compelling and highly original.
In untangling the career of the master spy Vano, Walker invites the reader into the historian's task of piecing together evidence from incomplete archival sources, making sense of motives, coming to terms with the story, and knowing when the job is done. Aspiring historians will find the methods Walker used to uncover this fascinating story invaluable in their own historical quests.
- GenresHistoryItalyNonfiction
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
2 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Walker
5 books14 followersJonathan Walker is the author of Pistols! Treason! Murder!: The rise and Fall of a Master Spy, and three novels: Five Wounds, The Angels of L19 and Push Process. He also makes photo zines, and has published a number of academic articles on the history of Venice. He has doctorates in European history and creative writing. On Bluesky and Instagram, his username is @NewishPuritan.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 5, 2023
The author takes in original approach to writing history. While well researched and documented (and definitely "scholarly"), this book is also not set up conventionally. Its a mix of "straight" history, in-depth analysis of 17th Century documents (mostly from the Venetian Council or Ten and the Inquisitors of State - the latter whose archives are organized in a, shall we say, idiosyncratic fashion), transcripts of conversations between the author and his friends in various Venetian drinking establishments, and illustrations/"comics" based on 16th and 17th Century woodcuts and engravings. While this makes for fascinating reading, it also feels more than a little disorganized - which, if Walker is trying to make his work more accessible to the general public, may have defeated the purpose. 3.5 stars.
March 31, 2026
Given the title, it would be easy to think this was either a novel or a highly popularized history. But Pistols! Treason! Murder! is fundamentally a conglomeration of a series of academic research papers about Venice, fully cited and full of quotes from primary sources, including primary sources that had not been used until the author discovered them.
In 1622, the body of Antonio Foscarini appeared between the two pillars in the Piazza, hanging by one leg, a sign—in Venice—that he was a convicted traitor. However, just ten months later, Foscarini was suddenly pardoned (too late). In between, two other men, Girolomo and Domenico Vano were arrested and executed, probably for falsely accusing Foscarini. The record of Foscarini’s trial was either never written down, intentionally destroyed, or lost in the centuries after. As a result, this case, and the similar but larger Bedmar Conspiracy of 1615, are largely mysterious, perhaps indicative of a kind of hysteria that overcame the Council of Ten in the early 17th century.
Then in the 90s, Jonathan Walker, the author of Pistols! Treason! Murder! came across a reference to a file about the Vanos and was able to trace it to the Venetian archives. Ultimately, though, the new information proved too thin, too ambiguous to resolve the Foscarini mystery. The resulting book is thus more about Vano and the author’s research project, deciphering and translating the notes he found. Given the narrow subject matter and the quantity of quotations from primary material, including photographs of the notes, this is in no way a popular history.
But it’s hard to call it an academic book either. It is written in a unique experimental style, including cartoons, photographs, chapters that consist of bar dialogue, and some other chapters that definitely draw on experimental fiction techniques. Experimental fiction? Yes, please. Experimental music? Perhaps? Experimental history? Color me skeptical.
But I was won over, fairly quickly, by the excellent prose. The author is also a novelist, and on the basis of the prose alone, I am seeking out one of those novels. For example:
… the foreign ambassadors tried to make sense of events by looking for portents. They were trying to rewrite the record; trying to remake themselves as men who knew all the secrets and who could find their way around in the dark without stumbling over the furniture. They short-circuited the gaps and fused an unstable, new tale that leaked doubt continually.
What delicious metaphors! The book is full of these, enlivening and emphasizing the content without distracting from it. In these further quotes, I think the author is consciously or unconsciously describing the real topic of this book—historical uncertainty:
Apart from this basic observation, there is not much to say. We cannot see past the words, or under their surface, into the black box of the Spanish embassy. … The tired old metaphors all apply. We are in a hall of mirrors, or perhaps at a masked ball (Vano is somewhere in the crowd, unrecognisable under his disguise.) In the absence of reliable or precise information, we deal in reflections that break apart at the touch.
That this is a book about spies and double-agents, that the Venetians were obsessed with secrecy, that Venice has the most notoriously labyrinthine street plan of any city in the world, and that street plan is surprisingly unchanged since the 17th century, all these facts provide opportunities for the author to make analogies with historical research. And, while this book is an extreme case, all history is ultimately a matter of reflecting on imprecise information. Primary sources are always incomplete; there is rarely enough time to read everything, and even in the most exhaustive examination of relatively recent events (Robert Caro’s biographies come to mind) we never know what is going on inside the minds of the subjects, even if they claim they are telling us the truth!
That this book uses novelistic techniques isn’t that strange, because the historian always brings a subjective viewpoint, even in a chronicle:
Take the conventional rules for writing history: and then; and then; an unending superfluity of events, a nauseating surfeit of time. Apply these rules with obsessive attention to detail and with the greatest possible exactitude. Then watch them warp and distort in the fairground mirror of Vano’s reports. However, moreover, conversely, paradoxically, possibly, probably: death by a thousand qualifications, the occupational hazard of the historian. When dealing with Vano, add to this list: confusingly, implausibly, surprisingly, incredibly. In short, if you want a neat plot resolution, go and read a novel.
In the end, all history has some aspects of fiction, some gaps in the story that need to be filled in or interpreted, but:
Ask the questions anyway. If I am responsible for what I say about Vano, then Vano must also be responsible for what he said about Bragadin, and Querini—and Foscarini.
I really loved parts of this book. Not every experiment worked. I don’t think the cartoons added much. I liked using the pub dialogues between the author and other historians to do exposition. When I finished this book and was reading a Peter Brown book, I found myself missing direct quotes and pictures from primary sources. I can imagine teaching it as a supplementary book in a course on historiography and research methods.
Some of the final chapters get more speculative, but despite the idiosyncratic style, most of the book is actually far more balanced than the typical expository history. I was trained as a mathematician and computer scientist, and one of the formative works was "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Hofstadter. Like this book, GEB uses cartoons, dialogues, odd metaphors, and Lewis Carroll-style digressions to teach the mathematical foundations of computer science. The subject of GEB is arguably even more objective, with even more potential for dryness, than history, and yet GEB works brilliantly, activating the student’s brain in ways that a regular textbook cannot.
Graphic novels like Maus and Persepolis have demonstrated that serious work can be done in alternative formats, and here the author is actually far closer to normal history than those works. Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance has taken much shorter steps in this direction, and it works brilliantly.
Would I want every history book I read to be in this style? No (though many could take lessons in basic prose). Will every reader enjoy the style of this book? Unlikely. But as an experiment, I think it works, and I think other historians could take inspiration from this to try to break out of a purely academic style
In 1622, the body of Antonio Foscarini appeared between the two pillars in the Piazza, hanging by one leg, a sign—in Venice—that he was a convicted traitor. However, just ten months later, Foscarini was suddenly pardoned (too late). In between, two other men, Girolomo and Domenico Vano were arrested and executed, probably for falsely accusing Foscarini. The record of Foscarini’s trial was either never written down, intentionally destroyed, or lost in the centuries after. As a result, this case, and the similar but larger Bedmar Conspiracy of 1615, are largely mysterious, perhaps indicative of a kind of hysteria that overcame the Council of Ten in the early 17th century.
Then in the 90s, Jonathan Walker, the author of Pistols! Treason! Murder! came across a reference to a file about the Vanos and was able to trace it to the Venetian archives. Ultimately, though, the new information proved too thin, too ambiguous to resolve the Foscarini mystery. The resulting book is thus more about Vano and the author’s research project, deciphering and translating the notes he found. Given the narrow subject matter and the quantity of quotations from primary material, including photographs of the notes, this is in no way a popular history.
But it’s hard to call it an academic book either. It is written in a unique experimental style, including cartoons, photographs, chapters that consist of bar dialogue, and some other chapters that definitely draw on experimental fiction techniques. Experimental fiction? Yes, please. Experimental music? Perhaps? Experimental history? Color me skeptical.
But I was won over, fairly quickly, by the excellent prose. The author is also a novelist, and on the basis of the prose alone, I am seeking out one of those novels. For example:
… the foreign ambassadors tried to make sense of events by looking for portents. They were trying to rewrite the record; trying to remake themselves as men who knew all the secrets and who could find their way around in the dark without stumbling over the furniture. They short-circuited the gaps and fused an unstable, new tale that leaked doubt continually.
What delicious metaphors! The book is full of these, enlivening and emphasizing the content without distracting from it. In these further quotes, I think the author is consciously or unconsciously describing the real topic of this book—historical uncertainty:
Apart from this basic observation, there is not much to say. We cannot see past the words, or under their surface, into the black box of the Spanish embassy. … The tired old metaphors all apply. We are in a hall of mirrors, or perhaps at a masked ball (Vano is somewhere in the crowd, unrecognisable under his disguise.) In the absence of reliable or precise information, we deal in reflections that break apart at the touch.
That this is a book about spies and double-agents, that the Venetians were obsessed with secrecy, that Venice has the most notoriously labyrinthine street plan of any city in the world, and that street plan is surprisingly unchanged since the 17th century, all these facts provide opportunities for the author to make analogies with historical research. And, while this book is an extreme case, all history is ultimately a matter of reflecting on imprecise information. Primary sources are always incomplete; there is rarely enough time to read everything, and even in the most exhaustive examination of relatively recent events (Robert Caro’s biographies come to mind) we never know what is going on inside the minds of the subjects, even if they claim they are telling us the truth!
That this book uses novelistic techniques isn’t that strange, because the historian always brings a subjective viewpoint, even in a chronicle:
Take the conventional rules for writing history: and then; and then; an unending superfluity of events, a nauseating surfeit of time. Apply these rules with obsessive attention to detail and with the greatest possible exactitude. Then watch them warp and distort in the fairground mirror of Vano’s reports. However, moreover, conversely, paradoxically, possibly, probably: death by a thousand qualifications, the occupational hazard of the historian. When dealing with Vano, add to this list: confusingly, implausibly, surprisingly, incredibly. In short, if you want a neat plot resolution, go and read a novel.
In the end, all history has some aspects of fiction, some gaps in the story that need to be filled in or interpreted, but:
Ask the questions anyway. If I am responsible for what I say about Vano, then Vano must also be responsible for what he said about Bragadin, and Querini—and Foscarini.
I really loved parts of this book. Not every experiment worked. I don’t think the cartoons added much. I liked using the pub dialogues between the author and other historians to do exposition. When I finished this book and was reading a Peter Brown book, I found myself missing direct quotes and pictures from primary sources. I can imagine teaching it as a supplementary book in a course on historiography and research methods.
Some of the final chapters get more speculative, but despite the idiosyncratic style, most of the book is actually far more balanced than the typical expository history. I was trained as a mathematician and computer scientist, and one of the formative works was "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Hofstadter. Like this book, GEB uses cartoons, dialogues, odd metaphors, and Lewis Carroll-style digressions to teach the mathematical foundations of computer science. The subject of GEB is arguably even more objective, with even more potential for dryness, than history, and yet GEB works brilliantly, activating the student’s brain in ways that a regular textbook cannot.
Graphic novels like Maus and Persepolis have demonstrated that serious work can be done in alternative formats, and here the author is actually far closer to normal history than those works. Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance has taken much shorter steps in this direction, and it works brilliantly.
Would I want every history book I read to be in this style? No (though many could take lessons in basic prose). Will every reader enjoy the style of this book? Unlikely. But as an experiment, I think it works, and I think other historians could take inspiration from this to try to break out of a purely academic style
April 9, 2023
Punk History. Very interesting. And some interesting ideas about the philosophy of history and of spying. Good research but in the end it dragged. Not sure what the cartoons added and the whole thing got a bit repetitive. Nice try though
April 19, 2024
Odd little quasi-academic book, a story retold. I could never really get into the prose style, or figure out what the author was trying to say, but the subject matter (representation and spying) was interesting enough to carry me through.
June 25, 2011
A fascinating experiment in a new approach to history writing; but I'm a maven for structure, and I did not see an arc or clear relationship among the different chapters. I don't need a narrative nor a pat expository frame, but this was too circular for me.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews