This has nothing to do with South Asia but in an attempt to mix up subjects I’m sharing this recent piece I wrote about crime fiction. Also see these related pieces on crime fiction: “Mehmet Murat Somer’s Turkish Delight Mysteries” and “Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz”.
One of my guilty pleasures is that I read police procedurals to relax. Though they are certainly not high art, these novels are paradoxically comforting– despite the violence they contain– since the reader knows that the mystery will be solved in the end. This perhaps explains why detective stories–of which police procedurals are a subgenre– continue to be one of the most popular literary genres. Agatha Christie, for example, is one of the world’s bestselling authors.
Sometime during the pandemic, I discovered Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano mysteries. At a time when we were all stuck at home, these novels allowed me to travel vicariously to Sicily. The books are full of local color. In particular–since Inspector Montalbano is a gourmand– they are full of descriptions of local cuisine.
The series often covers the connections between crime and politics–the Mafia is often involved in the plots. In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, Camilleri spoke about how he combined the detective novel with social commentary. He said: “In many crime novels, the events seem completely detached from the economic, political and social context in which they occur… In my books, I deliberately decided to smuggle into a detective novel a critical commentary on my times. This also allowed me to show the progression and evolution in the character of Montalbano”.
The books do have some weaknesses. While recently re-reading them, I was struck by the relative lack of female characters. Montalbano doesn’t have any female colleagues who assist him with his investigations. This is a major difference between these books and Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti novels for example–though even in the Brunetti books the main female colleague is a secretary. Many of the female characters who do appear are depicted in a sexualized manner. The most prominent female character is Montalbano’s longtime girlfriend Livia who mostly fights with him and serves as a love interest. This lack of female characters perhaps reflects the male bias of the police procedural genre.
Another weakness of the books is that the endings sometimes seem abrupt. Unlike Agatha Christie’s novels where the clues are left in a meticulous manner and the reader can often go back after finishing the novel and see how the solution was obvious, the Montalbano novels often turn on things suddenly falling in place for Montalbano. At least I couldn’t often see how he came to the particular conclusion he did.
I must also credit Stephen Sartarelli who has translated all the novels into English. The novels are very readable in English. Sartarelli particularly does an excellent job at helping the reader distinguish between those characters speaking in standard Italian and those speaking in Sicilian dialect.
In conclusion, I would highly recommend the Inspector Montalbano mysteries to those seeking an entertaining read which will also help them to learn about the social and political background of Sicily. These novels do for Sicily what the Guido Brunetti novels do for Venice.
