A Sicilian Sensation

There’s a quite wonderful profile of Italian novelist Andrea Camilleri in today’s edition of The Guardian, written by Paul Bailey. From it, we learn that the creator of Detective Inspector Salvo Montalbano (The Smell of the Night, Rounding the Mark) “came to writing late, publishing his first book in 1978, when he was 53”; that he “shows interest in very few crime writers, reserving particular praise for his fellow Marxist Dashiell Hammett, whom he considers infinitely superior to Raymond Chandler, whose plots he finds incredible”; that Camilleri, “now 81 and a dedicated and defiant chain-smoker,” has already penned “the very last Montalbano mystery,” but “hopes to produce a few more Montalbano novels before the final one is published”; and that the writer’s Sicilian hometown of “Porto Empedocle, on which Vigàta [Montalbano’s fictional home turf] is based, has changed its name to Vigàta,” so proud are its inhabitants of Camilleri’s work.

But my favorite section of this newspaper piece concerns Montalbano’s love life. I quote:

Montalbano has a long-term girlfriend called Livia, who lives and works in Genoa. Whenever the heroic cop is especially lovelorn, Livia is happy to adjust her schedule and hop on the next plane to Palermo to calm and comfort him. She just happens to be in Vigàta when François is captured [in The Snack Thief, 1996], and the child brings out all her dormant maternal feelings. He quickly responds to her loving attentiveness, and Montalbano contemplates the possibility of being not only a husband, but a father as well. The scenes in Montalbano’s house overlooking the sea, with the detective experiencing jealousy as Livia and François become ever more attached, are written with a tenderness that never degenerates into sentimentality.

Are the Montalbano novels formulaic in essence? Yes, of course they are, but Camilleri’s chosen formula allows him the freedom to explore any number of interesting and dissolute byways. Perhaps Montalbano’s most endearing characteristic is his passion for good food. He is always dismayed when his second-in-command, Inspector Mimì Augello, sprinkles an excess of Parmesan over a subtly flavoured dish. Augello is a dedicated womaniser, whereas his chief remains faithful to Livia, in spite of the many temptations he has to resist. Women of all ages find Montalbano attractive, none more so than the beautiful Swede, Ingrid Sjostrom, who is married to a wealthy Sicilian and, in the first book in the series, abused by her father-in-law. Ingrid, according to Camilleri, is every Italian man’s idea of a blonde bombshell. She has no religious scruples regarding sexual gratification, while her skill at the wheel of a sports car would incur the envy of Michael Schumacher. Whenever Montalbano needs to get from one part of the island to another in double-quick time, Sjostrom is invariably at hand to transport him. Every so often, she spends the night with him in the beach house, but Montalbano can be relied upon to leap from the bed as soon as Sjostrom gets seriously frisky.

Read the Guardian profile in its entirety here.

(Hat tip to Euro Crime.)