Sicilian communist who created Inspector Montalbano
Had Andrea Camilleri died in his 50s, his death would have barely received a mention in the British press, said The Guardian. Even in his native Italy, it would perhaps have only been noted in the culture sections of the more serious newspapers. An avant-garde left-wing intellectual, he was an influential figure in Italian theatre and television, but at that point little known to the general public. That started to change when he was 66, and published a thriller, The Hunting
Season, that became a bestseller in Italy; then, two years later, he brought out the first of his
Inspector Montalbano mysteries. These not only won him global acclaim, but triggered in him a “frenzy of literary activity at an age when most writers are in tranquil decline”: between 1994 and his death last week aged 93, Camilleri produced no fewer than 30 books that featured the “grouchy”, food loving, leftleaning Sicilian detective – and 60 others that did not. There were years, even in his 80s, when he published eight titles. “He was not so much an author as a one-man literary production line.”
Born in Sicily in 1925, he grew up in Porto Empedocle, on the island’s south coast, said The Daily Telegraph. His father, a harbour master, had taken part in the 1922 March on Rome that helped bring Mussolini to power; the family was related to the fascist playwright Luigi Pirandello; and though he’d later turn his back on fascism, Andrea wrote to Il Duce as a teenager, to beg him to lower the age for army recruitment, so that he could fight for the cause. Expelled from a seminary for throwing eggs at a crucifix, he left school in 1943, and briefly studied literature at the University of Palermo before moving into “two miserable rooms” in the remote mountain village of Enna, where he began to write poetry. He won a national poetry prize in 1947, and in 1949 took up a place at the prestigious Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica in Rome to study stage and film. In 1957, he put on the first production of Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame in Italy, and married Rosetta – a literature graduate whom he described as “the backbone of my existence” and with whom he had three daughters. Moving into television, he produced a string of hit detective series. He wrote his first novel in 1978; turned down by ten publishers, it flopped. His next one flopped too.
But Camilleri persevered, and finally, in the early 1990s, he found success as a writer. His
Montalbano books were formulaic (all were 180 pages long, and divided into 18 chapters), and their plots were repetitive said The Times. What distinguished them was Camilleri’s use of Sicilian dialect. Although many Italians struggled at first to understand his dialogue, it gave the books a distinct tone and sense of place. They sold in their tens of millions, and were turned into a successful TV series. Camilleri became rich, but it did not appear to alter his political convictions: like many Italians, he had joined the Italian Communist Party at the end of the War, and over the rest of his life, he supported a variety of left-wing causes. He was appalled by Silvio Berlusconi, and was even more outspoken in his criticism of the far-right League – which is now in a coalition government – and of its leader, Matteo Salvini. Salvini, he told The Guardian, reminded him of members of Mussolini’s regime. But fascism, he added, had never really died in Italy. “Italians naturally go for the strongman. They like to put their fate in the hands of someone who will make decisions for them.”