Andrea Camilleri: A Crime Reader’s Guide to the Classics ‹ CrimeReads

Neil Nyren provides Crimereads and devoted readers with the essential guide to Andrea Camilleri's "Inspector Montalbano" series of books.

“Are you trying to bust my balls?”

The speaker is Inspector Salvo Montalbano, head of the fictional municipality of Vigàta, Sicily’s, police department, and in the 28 novels and two short story collections written by Andrea Camilleri and published in Italian and English…someone always is.

The criminals, from petty to monstrous, who occupy his frustrating days (and sometimes alarming nightmares); the Mafia thugs who spread their tentacles into every Sicilian institution; the corrupt politicians who march hand in hand with them; the witless press that blindly supports whatever government is in charge at the moment; the colleagues who, for all their police skills, can’t help but complicate his life at times; the suspicious Commissioner who seems intent on complicating his life at all times; the lady friend in Genoa with whom he can’t seem to get through a phone conversation without squabbling; the succession of beautiful women he meets during his cases who offer serious temptations and, all too often, deceptions – all these people light his fuse, but do not deter him. 

With a mix of sardonic humor, cynicism, stubbornness, compassion, a nose for crime, and a very personal sense of justice, Montalbano dyspeptically perseveres through all the tragicomedy that imbues his beloved island, reminding us that incidents – and people – are often not what they seem, and that sometimes refusing to obey an order is a virtue, not a sin.

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@ Wikipedia

Andrea Camilleri, beloved creator of Inspector Montalbano, dies aged 93

From The Guardian: 

One of Italy’s most popular authors, Camilleri wrote 23 novels starring his Sicilian detective, selling more than 30m copies around the world.  Camilleri, who was born in Sicily in 1925, was taken to hospital in Rome in June after going into cardiac arrest.

The author had written a handful of historical novels when, in 1994 at the age of almost 70, he wrote The Shape of Water, the first book starring his now famous Sicilian detective. Set in the fictional town of Vigata, Camilleri was originally going to call his central detective The Commissioner, but decided to pay tribute to the Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, the Spanish author of novels about the investigator Pepe Carvalho.

The Montalbano series now runs to more than two dozen books, and has been translated into 32 languages, with more than 30m copies sold. The Potter’s Field, translated into English by Stephen Sartarelli, won Camilleri the International Dagger, the highest foreign honour of the British Crime Writers Association. The Italian television adaptation, screened on BBC Four and in 65 other countries, has brought tourists by the busload to Sicily. The town on which Vigata is based, Camilleri’s home town of Porto Empedocle, is so proud of its connection that it officially changed its name to Porto Empedocle Vigata in 2003.

Camilleri published the 30th Montalbano novel, Il cuoco dell’Alcyon, in 2018. The final novel in the series was written 13 years ago, but has been kept in his publisher’s Palermo offices for safekeeping. “When I get fed up with him or am not able to write any more, I’ll tell the publisher: publish that book. Sherlock Holmes was recovered … but it will not be possible to recover Montalbano. In that last book, he’s really finished,” he said in 2012.

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Review: Sect of Angels by Andrea Camilleri

I enjoy the premise of fiction based upon true events - and Camilleri makes use of an event from 1901, when a lawyer, Matteo Teresi (dc.1970), awaiting a decision on his membership to a private social club, decides to investigate an epidemic of miraculous pregnancies among the towns' young women. 

Sicily 1901: This was a period of political turmoil; from the mid 1840s, the northern part of Italy supported the partisans of Garibaldi for unification against the royalists (the Bourbons) who still ruled in the south (including Sicily). Decades of rioting and revolt ensued until the royalist were ousted and a new regime installed, supported by troops from Piedmont. The Church was losing ground and many of its institutions, including schools, were being closed. Italy at this time was akin to a police state. In the outlying smaller towns and villages, the Church and local aristocracy still held sway, as did the emerging mafia clans, and the people continued to thumb their noses at what the considered interference in local affairs by a government that ruled in absentia. 

What the lawyer Teresi will find is a wall of silence built up by key (and often conflicting) elements within the small community - the Church, the Mafia, the Nobility. It is not hard to identify with Teresi, and shake your head at the head-in-the-sand attitude of the simple (yet uniquely characterised) townsfolk who would prefer that the crime be swept under the carpet rather than face the horrible truths - an "enforced community silence on the religious prostitution of their women ..". His investigation leads him to be denounced as a troublemaker, and the more he searches for the truth, the backlash begins and his career is slowly being ruined - "... they were scorching the earth all around him ...".

The real Matteo Teresi was forced to flee to America (1907) where he became an advocate of Italian immigrants, writing a number of articles. I was interested in discovering more of the history and the person of the real Matteo Teresi, but found very little on him except for a number of articles he had written. I found even less on the real-life events, which I have narrowed down to quite possibly have taken place in the town of Alia in the provence of Palermo c.1901.

Andrea Camilleri on the novel's real-life element (source: la Republica - October 2011):

It was said of true history: it seems to understand from her note that she crossed it by chance: is it so?

"Exactly: sifting through the preface of the former mayor of Alia, Gaetano D'Andrea, to the anastatic reprint of a collection of articles by Matteo Teresi, a humanitarian socialist lawyer. I found the book in my hands I don't know how: intrigued entitled, "With the homeland in the heart", I started reading it. Needless to say, the story of the priests who found a secret sect in order to mobilize young virgins who were still virgins struck me: it was a case that crossed the Strait causing the indignation of many political and religious exponents, including Turati and Sturzo: a socialist and a priest who are together, on the same side of the barricade ".

On the other hand, however, the agrarians, the mafia and the fanatic clergy, are in league, imposing silence on the population ...

"The lawyer Matteo Teresi, who also had a degree in pharmacy, writes fiery articles on his magazine. With the result of incurring the wrath of the bishop of Cefalù, who organizes a solemn and reparative procession. In the end, with broken bones , he is forced to take arms and luggage and leave for the United States. In short, to come out is the usual, old Italian vice: that of turning the complainant into a denounced one, the innocent into guilty, the judge into a criminal ".

The Overnight Kidnapper by Andrea Camilleri

The new novel in the irresistible and transporting New York Times bestselling Inspector Montalbano mystery series

The day gets off to a bad start for Montalbano: while trying to break up a fight on Marinella beach, he hits the wrong man and is stopped by the Carabinieri. When he finally gets to the office, the inspector learns about a strange abduction: a woman was abducted, drugged, and then released unharmed a few hours later. A few days later, the same thing happens again, but this time the woman abducted is the niece of Enzo, the owner of Montalbano’s favorite trattoria. The only link between the two events is that both women are thirty years old and work in a bank. 

Alongside this investigation, Montalbano has to deal with an arson case. A shop that sells household appliances has burned down, and its owner, Marcello Di Carlo, seems to have vanished into thin air. Has he run off with his lover after a holiday in the Canary Islands? Is he fleeing from his creditors, or was he murdered by the mafia for not paying their protection money? At first this seems like a trivial case, but a third abduction—yet again of a girl who works in a bank—and the discovery of a body bring up new questions. Whose body is it? And where has Di Carlo’s secret lover gone?

Review: The Brewer of Preston by Andrea Camilleri

This was an added extra when I picked up a few of Camilleri's "Inspector Montalbano" books from the local library.

The setting Vigata in the 1870s, and the proposed production of a play - the Brewer of Preston - at the local theatre by the Prefect of Vigata - an event which the townsfolk intend will never happen. 

What was unexpected was how this writing style differs so much from the "Inspector Montalbano" novels. The chapters, which introduce us to an eclectic and eccentric cast of characters, are presented in no particular order - in fact we are told to read them in whatever order we like! As we slowly read, we pick up little hints as to how each scene and the characters will eventually relate, and the circumstances that bring them all together begins to unfold.

" ... how many things in Sicily happened by mistake ..."

The writing is at times sardonic, comedic, tragic, farcical, absurd. Loaded with clever, and often satirical, writing, Camilleri reveals tempestuous political scheming and double crossing, murder, infidelity, police corruption, anarchy, organised crime - and above, the Sicilian style of justice.

One is left wondering ... is the opera being acted out on the stage or in the real lives of the novel's characters...