The shape of something great
Fall the perfect time to revisit the first in Camilleri's classic Montalbano series

The brisk, wet, facsimile of a muscular winter to come sent me to my bookshelves for a Camilleri. Sounds like an after-dinner cocktail, but it’s not, although the heady effects are kindred. 

Born in 1925 in Sicily, Andrea Camilleri became a noted playwright, screen writer and film director, maintaining a professorship of film direction for 20 years at the Academia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica in Rome.

Sporting electrified white hair and a face of exaggerated expressions under a penumbra of cigarette smoke, Camilleri was one of only a few genuine geniuses in their professions. However, he flopped with a couple of novels until he hit upon a fictitious Chief Inspector Salvo Montalbano in the fictitious Sicilian seaside town of Vigata. 

Montalbano and Sicily upgraded Camilleri’s previous theatrical work, and the world of “literary” crime fiction immediately saw a style of a police procedural falling headlong into comedy. 

The first of Camilleri’s Montalbano novels, “The Shape of Water,” was published in Italy in 1994 and translated into English in 2002. Here, we were first introduced to Montalbano of the Polizia di Vigata after a prominent engineer and politico is found dead in a most undistinguished state in his luxury car with his pants down to his ankles. That he would be with a woman other than his wife is overlooked, but to die in such lowly circumstances is scandalous. While “natural causes” is the official and politically correct decree, this is too mortifying not to look further into the messy circumstances. Quite a mystery ensues, which is adroitly solved in between meals never missed.

Before his death in 2019, Camilleri wrote 28 Montalbano novels, all brilliantly translated into English by New York University’s Stephen Sartarelli. Camilleri referred to Montalbano as a “serial killer of characters” – meaning Montalbano developed a life of his own, demanding great attention from his author to the demise of other potential books. Camilleri added that he wrote a Montalbano novel every so often just so the character would be appeased, and he could work on other stories.

“The Shape of Water” isn’t where you have to start reading the genius of Andrea Camilleri, but after you read one Camilleri book, you’ll want to read another. So you might as well start at the beginning. These are bedtime stories. They’re sweet, sublimely humorous, soothing and relaxing in the unique way Sicilians relax. Montalbano is such a superb characterization, he’s lovable. You’ll want to have him to your dinner parties and introduce him to your father – but not your mother or sister. He is at once brilliant, charming and spirited and coy and devious. 

If Sicily is like its reputation, or even a scintilla of the way Camilleri portrays it, graft is endemic in everyday life. Being a police inspector in a Sicilian fife is dicey business. Montalbano knows the rules: throw the little fish back, don’t sweat the small corruptions and revenge killings, get down with the money and let the big sharks set their own nets in which to get caught.

The plots of Camilleri’s Montalbano mysteries are beside the point. Camilleri weaves precious Sicilian mysteries one after another, luxuriating in a Sicily painted vivid by a blunt No. 2 pencil from behind the ear of a crafty old man.

I own all of Camilleri’s books – in paperback, unfortunately, as that is how they arrive in translation – and if my house were to burn, I would save other books but mourn the loss of Montalbano and the poetic writing of Camilleri. And I’d replace every book.

Start with “The Shape of Water” just because it’s Camilleri’s first Montalbano book, and you’ll be back for more of these small, nicely bound $17 books of 200-some pages. You’ll be proud of yourself to have taken my advice. But you’ll have to ask Maria’s Bookshop to order this, or any of Camilleri’s books; they’re for true literary readers only.