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Part of the appeal of the series is its traditional genre format. Readers know, broadly speaking, exactly what to expect with a new book. The middle-aged Montalbano dominates every novel. He’s supported by a cast of recurring characters — including loyal, if quirky subordinates, a domineering boss, and Livia, the strangely patient girlfriend to whom he never quite commits himself.
Then there’s the setting — Sicily, of course, where Montalbano is the head of the police department in the fictional town of Vigata, but also the wider canvas of contemporary Italy. Like many modern crime novelists, Camilleri consciously intends not only to mirror the society in which he lives but also to point out its shortcomings. The novels reveal his profound, if weary, cynicism about the morality of politicians and officials.
The disappearance of Fazio, Montalbano’s beloved colleague, triggers the plot of the new novel. The police investigation leads to a couple of corpses at the bottom of lonely wells. There’s also a wounded man, whom local mafiosi attempt to kill while he’s in hospital. While trying to find the patient’s room, Montalbano meets Angela, an attractive nurse who seems suspiciously keen to seduce him.
The inspector progresses by breath-taking hops of intuition rather than by flights of reasoning and the patient assemblage of evidence. It has to be said that the crime that underpins the murders and provides their motivation turns out to be rather underwhelming when at last it is revealed. Moreover, it occurs in the wings rather than centre-stage. Much is made of the difference between ‘trafficking’ and ‘smuggling’, a distinction whose significance may be clearer in the original Italian than it is in English.
Occasionally the book lapses into silliness, which detracts from its impact — when Montalbano wants to avoid his boss, the Commissioner, for example, he invents on the spot an urgent need to stay at home for the visit of a Swiss specialist named Gruntz, who is coming to perform a rectal procedure called the double Scrockson on him. Nor can Camilleri resist the temptation to bring in the TV series — in the book, Montalbano is keen to avoid running into a film crew at work on it and risk meeting the actor playing his more glamorous fictional self.
Fortunately, to a large extent the novel’s virtues outweigh its drawbacks. The narrative is swift-moving, without any obvious effort on the author’s part to inject pace — Camilleri writes with deceptive clarity; and he is very good at leap-frogging to the next scene and bypassing unnecessary links. Montalbano is attractive, too — alpha-male self-confidence softened with pockets of warmth, vulnerability and mystery; the reader is never allowed to learn the whole of his thought processes. Sicily makes a wonderful setting — and the translator skilfully preserves the distinction between standard Italian and the Sicilian dialect of the locals.
Most of all, though, what lingers in the mind are the occasional moments of sheer horror — beginning with the unexplained death of the seagull — as well as the wonderful details of Sicilian cuisine. In this book, as in the rest of the series, the food is almost a character in its own right. At one point, Montalbano opens his refrigerator and is overwhelmed by the ‘vast treasure’ piled up for him by his devoted housekeeper: ‘aubergine Parmigiana, pasta with sausage, caponata, aubergine dumplings, caciocavallo di Ragusa, and passuluna olives.’ This is indeed crime fiction at its tastiest.
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