| The Figli della Lupa (Children of the She-Wolf) is what the young girls' branch of the "Young Italians""" a compulsory Fascist youth organisation "" were called. And a cadavere eccellente or an "outstanding corpse" is the colloquial term for "the dead body of an important personage, especially when the death has occurred in shady circumstances". |
| I don't know why other people read detective novels. I read them not for the plot, not for the exquisite corpse at the centre of the plot, not for meditations on the nature of evil, but for the two ingredients that also make for good literature: gossip, and utterly useless pieces of trivia. |
| If you're prepared to compromise on the detecting end of the deal, Andrea Camilleri's approach to the genre could take you back to the days of Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allen Poe, where character and atmosphere were at least as important as the plot. |
| Camilleri's detective, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, practises his calling in Sicily, has a healthy phobia concerning the prospect of being promoted, a tangled love life and a sympathetic understanding of the workings of local eccentrics and local bureaucracy, not to mention a positive passion for food. |
| He resembles Nero Wolfe in his appetites, if not his girth, but unlike Wolfe, whose tastes in cuisine as well as orchids was on the recherche side, Montalbano is an admirer of the simple things of life "" freshly tossed pasta, anchovies streaming water from the sea, deceptively plain sauces that burst with complexity upon the tongue. |
| He has something of the philosophical acceptance of life and a sensibility that might make Michael Dibdin's fans feel that they have stumbled across a version, if a paler one, of Aurelio Zen. |
| The Terracotta Dog, the second in the series of nine books featuring Montalbano, is a step up from The Shape of Water. |
| It opens with a sentence of leisurely dimensions: "To judge from the entrance the dawn was making, it promised to be a very iffy day "" that is, blasts of angry sunlight one minute, fits of freezing rain the next, all of it seasoned with sudden gusts of wind "" one of those days when someone who is sensitive to abrupt shifts in weather and suffers them in his blood and brain is likely to change opinion and direction continuously, like those sheets of tin, cut in the shape of banners and roosters, that spin every which way on rooftops with each new puff of wind." |
| That sets the tone for The Terracotta Dog: if evil stalks the land, and if foul crimes are to be committed by men with darkness in their hearts, the author will deal with them in similar fashion, taking his time about it as he plumbs the depths of human nature and chats about the weather while throwing in a fair dollop of blood, bone and the skull beneath the skin. |
| The first challenge that Montalbano is faced with is how to orchestrate the capture of a "man of honour", as the Mafiosi prefer to refer to themselves. Tano the Greek (who is not Greek at all, but owes his name "to a certain vice thought in the popular imagination to be greatly appreciated in the vicinity of the Acropolis) wants to turn himself in. |
| He's a tired old Mafioso who harks wistfully back to the good old days when the Mafia didn't have to work so hard to keep up with new-age crimes, and a big catch. |
| Montalbano, however, must work the arrest so that it looks convincing, for reasons that will be explained later in the plot. As the good Inspector does a little fancy footwork, news comes in of a supermarket heist where the robbers inexplicably abandon the loot. |
| The Inspector's life, already slightly stormy on account of his turbulent relationship with a young woman called Livia, rapidly gets more complicated as two bodies are discovered in a cave "" a man and a woman, caught in a deadly embrace, and watched over by the surreal figure of a terracotta dog. |
| His attempts to solve the supermarket puzzle and the conundrum of the corpses will take him back into the dark history of Italy during World War II. |
| It is one of Camilleri's peculiarities that, even when he orchestrates a convincing crime scenario, the mystery part of the murder seems to take a backseat. |
| Instead, what I read the Montalbano novels for is the sound of Talian "" a local dialect in Sicily that is considered more rustic than proper Italian "" and the earthy blend of Italian undercut with Sicilian idioms that he writes in. |
| Stephen Sartarelli, Camilleri's translator, pulls off the astonishing feat of conveying the flavour of a dialect from one language into the standardised speech of a completely different tongue without resorting to the kind of linguistic tricks that can give the reader a migraine. |
| The Terracotta Dog was inspired by the legend of the People in the Cave, a real-life instance of corpses never identified, but endlessly speculated on, and Camilleri's spin on this particular legend is ambitious. |
| And of course, I read it for the gossip, for the trivia, Camilleri's sardonic humour "" and the food. Where else could I meet a detective inspector who will notice, in the middle of a crowded street, the particular scent of a dish of boiled lamb entrails sprinkled with caciocavallo cheese? |
| The Terracotta Dog |
| Andrea Camilleri Picador £15.99 (Hardback), Pages: 304 |
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