INSPECTOR SALVO MONTALBANO

NATIONALITY: INTALIA / AUTHOR: ANDREA CAMILLERI

Barbara Pezzotti

Montalbano: A new detective for a new Sicily

The Sicilian Andrea Camilleri (b. 1925) is the most famous contemporary Italian crime writer. His highly entertaining series featuring Commissario (Inspector) Salvo Montalbano has won an enormous readership in Italy. Camilleri's books, set in an invented Sicilian village called Vigàta, and the subsequent TV series produced by the state TV RAI, to the revival of Italian crime fiction or giallo in the 1990s and 2000s and the progressive shift from foreign crime fiction to local in the preferences of Italian readers. The Montalbano detective series has also enjoyed international recognition with translations in Greek, Norwegian, Turkish, Lithuanian, Japanese, Estonian, Hungarian and Gaelic, as well as in the most commonly used languages. Today Camilleri is considered one of the most popular contemporary writers in the world with an estimated 65 million books sold worldwide.

A great part of the international success of Andrea Camilleri's series is due to Commissario Montalbano, an engaging character and a notably original figure in Italian crime fiction. Contrary to the giallo tradition of having a Northern policeman investigating in Southern regions prey to the Mafia and plagued by the omertà (code of silence), Montalbano and his efficient team are all Sicilians. Equally important, the detective not only successfully investigates deaths ordered by criminal organizations, but also looks into a wide range of bourgeois crimes that often intertwine with political intrigues, or are mistakenly taken for Mafia killings. Finally, the series features a fruitful relation between the police force and the local population with the latter not afraid to help in the investigation. It may be argued that by using a Sicilian detective and presenting a different Sicily, Camilleri confronts and subtly detonates a repository of clichés about Sicily and Sicilians. In so doing he also reacts against the rhetoric of the Northern League, a secessionist political party that rose to power in the 1990s under the aegis of deeply controversial Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The ongoing Montalbano series was inaugurated in 1994 with La forma dell'acqua (translated as The Shape of the Water, 2002); that book was followed by 21 novels and several collections of short stories. The recurring format represents a synthesis of the standard police procedural and a classic puzzle scenario where all the clues are scattered throughout the story – and the solution often comes as a revelation to the Sicilian detective. Modelled on the figure of Simenon's Inspector Jules Maigret, Montalbano is also a lover of fine cuisine and shares with his literary forefather a keen analytical mind and a penetrating insight into people's behaviour. However, unlike Maigret, Montalbano lives alone near the sea, in a small villa at Marinella, a fictional suburb of the fictional village of Vigàta. He has a tempestuous long-distance relationship with his fiancée, Livia Burlando, who lives in the North of Italy. The series makes much play with Montalbano's complicated private life, following a recurrent trend in recent crime fiction which registers a progressive shift 'from investigation and case to protagonist and life' (Molander Danielsson 2002: 148–49). This shift has allowed Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones to compare a variety of crime series to the autobiographical style of writing (Walton and Jones 1999: 153–54). Indeed, the series follows an aging Montalbano, who becomes more melancholic and disillusioned about the meaning and the usefulness of his job, and questions his relationship with Livia, his relatives and friends. In this sense he is very different from Maigret, whose relationship with his wife is unproblematic in the Simenon series. Montalbano is also notably different from Leonardo Sciascia's fictional detectives whose private lives are either non-existent or are never discussed in the novels.

The dissimilarities between Sciascia's and Camilleri's crime novels are particularly intriguing. Fellow Sicilian Sciascia (1921–1989) was a much-acclaimed master of Italian crime fiction and the first Italian author to provide a lucid and measured analysis of the role of the Mafia within Italian politics and society. He also drew attention to the many flaws in Italian politics in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and meditated upon the meaning of justice and power, and the relationship between the Catholic Church and the state. Among his books are some internationally known crime novels, translated into several languages, including English, French, Spanish and German. In his crime novels Il giorno della civetta (1961; translated first as Mafia Vendetta in 1963 and then republished as The Day of the Owl, 1984) and A ciascuno il suo (1966; first translated as A Man's Blessing in 1968 and then as To Each His Own, 1992) in particular, the two investigators, respectively Captain Bellodi and the amateur detective Professor Laurana, investigate Mafia crimes. In both novels, the detective is a disempowered figure who is defeated by the Mafia. The police detective Bellodi is a foreigner combating a hostile social environment, and is ultimately being transferred back to the North of Italy, while the Sicilian Laurana is unable to deal with a gangrene that is infecting his homeland, and is mocked by his fellow villagers before finally being murdered. Since the appearance of Sciascia's novels, the Manichaean counterpoint of the invincible Mafioso and the defeated investigator have become a constant trait in the giallo. At least, that is, until the publication of Camilleri's novels that finally featured a Sicilian detective who successfully fights crimes in a Sicily that has become homogeneous with the mainland.

Indeed, one of the most original characteristics of the Montalbano series is that it is set in an imaginary town within a real geography, the island of Sicily. Vigàta is a microcosm in which Camilleri describes a Sicilian society in constant evolution (Pezzotti 2012: 129). Camilleri's Sicily is a place where women are emancipated and locals are not afraid of the Mafia. In other words, his Sicily differs from a common perception of the South in Italian literature and culture. As Pischedda highlights, Camilleri has 'inoculated the virus of modernity' in a land that in crime fiction is traditionally described as backward (Pischedda 2007: 16). In other words, Camilleri acknowledges that Sicily retains some local characteristics, but also shows how it has become open to the influence of broad social, cultural and economic trends as opposed to the traditional image of the island as a place of historical immobility.

In this environment, Montalbano moves at ease. He is neither an outsider like Captain Bellodi nor a marginalized figure like Professor Laurana. In the manner of the typical literary detective he can mix with different social classes, and he is always able to take control of a situation. His investigations are often distinctly challenging, and though he may struggle with Italian bureaucracy, he always manages to solve his cases. He can also count on the...