From Thomas Mann to Patricia Highsmith and from Henry James to Daphne du Maurier, Venice has not merely exerted a potent fascination on novelists but has brought out the best in them. The beauty of mouldering palazzi reflected in water contaminated with garbage has represented spiritual deliquescence; secret courtyards, labyrinthine alley-ways and choked gardens have represented mystery, danger and intrigue.

The Venetian genius loci, corrupt and corrupting, broods over Muriel Spark's Territorial Rights like a miasma. It is evoked in a series of delicate, almost evanescent aquarelles…. (p. 28)

For this short novel, Miss Spark has taken over—not for the first time—the apparatus of the thriller and put it to her own idiosyncratic uses…. [The characters and coincidences characteristic of this form] are interwoven with the artificiality of a minor Restoration comedy or a lesser Feydeau farce. Obviously, Miss Spark does not intend this to be a...