I spent a couple of weeks traveling in Sicily recently, and so I thought reading a Sicilian mystery there would be appropriate. Andrea Camilleri wrote The Terra-Cotta Dog in 1996, and it was translated by Stephen Sartarelli in 2002. Camilleri’s main character is Salvo Montalbano, a Sicilian police inspector in a town called Vigàta. Vigàta is a wholly fictional town, but after the phenomenal success of Camilleri’s mysteries, his home town in Sicily, Port Empedocles near Agrigento, added Vigàta to its official name.
Montalbano is a very literate police inspector, and throughout the book there are references to his reading. He likes the Spanish mystery writer Vazquez Montalbán, whose name is the Spanish version of his own and whose mysteries, like Camilleri’s, also have many references to food and its preparation. But Montalbano also reads Faulkner and quotes Shakespeare as well as other dramatists, perhaps because Camilleri taught for many years at a school of drama.
Montalbano, though he is companionable enough in other respects, likes to eat alone. His housekeeper leaves him dishes in the icebox or in the oven: poached baby octopus, the casserole called pasta ‘ncasciata, anchovies baked in lemon juice, spaghetti with sardines, and other Sicilian treats.
Montalbano and his associates are always worried about moles in their organization—mafia spies—and in fact there is a kind of cold war between the police and the mafiosi. The factual basis of this struggle becomes apparent before one has even deplaned at the airport outside Palermo, which has been renamed Falcone-Borsellino Airport after the two judges murdered in 1992 for their anti-mafia activities. Mostly the violence happens within the mafia, and there is a chilling indifference born of use with which the police regard the killings of one mafioso by another.
The plot is complex and begins with a well-known mafioso giving himself up to Montalbano. He wants the police inspector to stage the surrender as a surprise arrest. The man’s associates are not fooled and they kill him, but before he dies, the mafioso gives Montalbano information about a large gun-smuggling operation. Montalbano finds the cache of weapons, but nearby discovers a young couple, murdered fifty years earlier, just before the Americans entered Italy in 1943. The fifty-year-old crime begins to consume Montalbano’s thoughts; he becomes obsessed with it in the way Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s inspector is obsessed with the murder of a little girl in The Pledge, a book that Montalbano thinks of in connection with his own obsession. Unlike Dürrenmatt’s character though, Montalbano solves this one. I think you might like it, but you might have to go to Sicily to get the full effect. ( )

The Terracotta Dog was a bit of an improvement over the first book in the series. We start to find out a bit more about Montalbano. Though I still wouldn't say there was a lot of depth there, we start to see a bit of roundness in his character beyond just "hardass cop." However, the story line is a big improvement...much smoother and more coherent. It passed a couple of hours pleasantly. Had the series ended there, it probably would never occur to me to recommend it to anyone but I enjoyed myself. ( )

The second book in the superb Inspector Montalbano series opens with a meeting between Montalbano and mafioso Tano the Greek. Feeling like a dinosaur, out of touch with modern ways, this leading and feared member of the Mafia establishment wants Montalbano to stage a fitting arrest so that he can retire in safety, with his honour intact. Together with a mysterious supermarket robbery, and the puzzling death of an 80-year old fascist, there seems little to link these disparate threads. But with Tano's eventual deathbed confession, a cave filled with weapons is uncovered and the links all lead to the cracking of a major weapons running racket.

However, these events, while seemingly at the center of this mystery, all soon become incidental to a another more compelling mystery in Montalbano's eyes; the discovery of two bodies entwined like lovers in a second cave, behind a sealed entrance in the first. Dating from the Second World War, they lay on a rug with a water pot and a bowl of coins anchoring the two upper corners, while a terracotta dog lies at their feet. A bizarre burial, for which finding the answer becomes an all consuming obsession for Montalbano, leading the commissioner's admonishment, "...what you're engaged in is not an investigation, but an act of mental ma*turbation" (p. 198).

Salvo Montalbano's colleagues are all back, as is his largely absent girlfriend Livia, as well as Ingrid from The Shape of Water. Corporal Anna Ferrara reappears and is still habouring illusions about her relationship with Salvo - a situation that comes to a head in a cruel but necessary move by Montalbano in a bedroom scene on pages 184-185. Combining Camilleri's sharp wit, the Sicilian setting, and the myriad of minor characters that populate the fictional seaside town of Vigata; this is a fascinating and engaging mystery that does not disappoint after the excellent first novel. ( )

Du bon Camillieri, avec une pointe de fantastique. ( )

Inspector Montalbano returns for a second session of crime solving in this charming book by Andrea Camilleri. I "read" this book via audio and found it much easier going than the first volume which I read in print. The foreign names and unfamiliar references tripped me up when I saw them more than hearing an excellent reader say them for me. Or perhaps, it was just becoming more comfortable with this author and his style and wonderful characters. Either way, I enjoyed this book much more than the first, "The Shape of Water".

In this story, Mantalbano solves the mystery of a stolen truck discovered loaded with groceries by discovering a cache of stolen weapons and stumbling onto the remains of a 50-year old murder that no one even knew about. It is this old murder mystery which captures his imagination and compels him to search for both the identies of the 2 bodies and their killer. Discovering the identity of the life-sized terra cotta dog which guarded the remains was the easy part.

Salvo Montalbano reminds me (in some bizarre twist of the mind, I'm sure) of MC Beaton's Hamish Macbeth. Both are humble, avoiding the spotlight, and promotion, whenever possible. Both have an understanding and acceptance of human nature and the ability to see through attempts to confuse and misdirect them. I find Montalbano to be more interesting and complex than Macbeth, and so far, Camilleri's books seem less formulaic than Beaton's - although maybe I just haven't read enough of them yet.

This book was delightful, and I am looking forward to the next in the series. ( )