Move Over, Miss Marple

Camilleri’s Montalbano is a cross between Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen and Leon’s Guido Brunetti, marrying the former’s lone-wolf idiosyncrasies with the latter’s family man-epicure-team leader proclivities. He lives alone— though there’s a long-suffering girlfriend on the scene— unplugs the phone lest it disturb a good meal, connects instinctively with people of a certain aesthetic and emotional sensibility and solves mysteries with a combination of intuition and intelligence. He is the pivot of the series; if it works, credit must go largely to him— never over the top, never picture-book perfect, never infallible, just a straight, un-selfconscious player working an essentially corrupt, even farcical, system with the weapons at his disposal.

That these weapons still work in a world miles removed from Poe and Poirot and Philip Marlowe is the life-affirming moral of the Montalbano mysteries. Not for him ‘gentlemanly’ murders in country houses and golf links: Montalbano’s Vigata—an imaginary town somewhere in Sicily—is peopled by stop-at-nothing drug-dealers, illegal immigrants from across the sea and the newly porous overland borders, desperate lovers and traders in flesh and souls. Changing Europe, in fact, is a recurring theme across the new crop of Italian mysteries.

The more things change, though, the more some things remain the same, Montalbano realises as he nears the closure of the investigation recorded in The Voice of the Violin. A beautiful, young woman has been murdered; the suspects are, alas, a half-wit admirer and a cold-fish of a husband. Or is there someone else, a third man, who’s actually the primary paramour? And if so, what could possibly motivate such a murder—and the removal of all traces of the victim’s clothes?

Filling up the sidelines of the linear whodunit are a host of minor stories. This, the fourth Montalbano mystery, takes up several strands from the preceding novel, The Snack Thief; they may fox the first-time reader somewhat, but don’t really impede the basic story.

Translating a story— more so, a mystery—so heavily imbued with the sense of place as the Montalbano series is, could not have been easy, but Stephen Sartarelli, himself a poet, does an incredible job of conveying the linguistic jokes and the sardonic sense of humour. The humour, and the humanity—and an elemental sense of sadness, familiar to ancient cultures steeped in very modern ills —in fact, are the long-stay factors; they remain with the reader long after the obvious page-turner questions have been answered.

So, go ahead, pick up your copy. And savour each page as Montalbano does his coral sauce on pasta.