Adrian McKinty wins another award

Adrian McKinty's novel Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly has won Australia's Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel. The award follows his capture of the Best Paperback Original prize at the Edgar Awards in New York this past spring for Rain Dogs. Here's what I had to say about Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly earlier this year.

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 Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy series, now six novels into what was once called the Troubles Trilogy, keeps getting better and better.

The language is gorgeous, the characters are endearing, the atmosphere full both of humor and of off-hand, everyday life, menacing and otherwise. With this much good crime writing coming out of Northern Ireland, how can anyone mention the Nordic countries in the same breath? Hell, how about the rest of the world? With McKinty ably supported by a cast that includes Stuart Neville just as a start, why is Northern Ireland not routinely numbered among the world's great crime fiction locations?

McKinty's books portray their settings as vividly as do Arnaldur Indriðason's Erlendur novels, set in Iceland (and they're a lot funnier). His Sean Duffy is as endearingly flawed as Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano (Poetry and music are to Duffy what food is to Montalbano, and the two characters lead similarly complicated romantic lives, although— but you'll have to read Book Six, the recently released Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly, to complete that thought.)  McKinty's Belfast is every bit as vivid a crime fiction locale as Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseille.  And he turns as unsparing an eye on that locale as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö did on Sweden in their Martin Beck novels

Not only that, but McKinty deftly takes on any number of traditional mystery and crime tropes, and the Duffy series and their protagonist are erudite without being condescending. McKinty has also long attacked the notion that a writer's style ought to be workmanlike and invisible. He champions David Peace and James Ellroy, for example, so you know you're bound to find a gorgeous passage or two, prose you can relish for its own sake, in every book.  And if you listen to books, you're in for a treat. Gerard Doyle, the reader of the Sean Duffy audiobooks, is a master of accents, and he gives each character a distinct voice without ever descending to bathos and exaggeration. The audio versions pair the best of crime novels with the best of audiobook readers.

(The five previous Sean Duffy novels are The Cold, Cold Ground; I Hear the Sirens in the Street; In the Morning I'll be Gone; Gun Street Girl; and Rain Dogs. I've been a McKinty fan for years. Read all my Detectives Beyond Borders posts about his work.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

My first seven audio crime books

Audiobooks are a cool medium: They don't compel engagement the way a real printed book does; one drifts in and out or does other things, the reading fading into background music. So here's a fragmented discussion of my first batch of audiobooks, appropriate to their fragmented medium:

1) Gun Street Girl and Rain Dogs, by Adrian McKinty. The author is a friend. He's also one of the very best of all crime writers, far beyond silly discussions about whether crime fiction can be serious literature. His probing, funny, beautifully written novels are unafraid to use traditional crime fiction forms, including the locked-room mystery. Whichever crime writer you're reading, McKinty is better.

2) Grinder and Darwin's Nightmare, by Mike Knowles. Some of the most exciting and intelligent action stories you're likely to read, exciting because they're intelligent and intelligent because they're exciting.  Readers who like Richard Stark's Parkerd novels or "Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai" might like these.

3) One or the Other and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, by John McFetridge. No one better and more seamlessly combines character, story, and history, in this case that of Montreal and Toronto in the 1970s and '80s.

4) Montalbano's First Case, by Andrea Camilleri. Among the delights of this short-story collection is one harrowing meta-fiction that at once demonstrates Camilleri's ability to write hyper-violence and shows why he chose not to do so.

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Camilleri in my newspaper

My review of The Dance of the Seagull, latest of Andrea Camilleri's novels about Salvo Montalbano to appear in English, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

"The title," quoth the Inquirer, "refers to a seagull's dance of death that Salvo witnesses from his seaside home and that haunts him and his dreams throughout the novel. Camilleri integrates this dream into the mystery more skillfully than he has done in earlier books. He's beginning to get the hang of this Montalbano thing.

"... introspection and empathy need not imply surrender or resignation. Indeed, Salvo not only solves the murders and arrests the murderers, but he also manages to exact a bit of revenge from a powerful target."

Spoiler alert: Salvo does not curse the saints until Page 104.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Dance of the Seagull: How Camilleri gets better and better

Fifteen books into his Inspector Salvo Montalbano series (with several titles yet to translated from Italian/Sicilian/Camillerian into English), Andrea Camilleri manages both to offer readers the pleasures they've grown to expect and to vary the ingredients and add enough emotional depth to keep the series from growing tired.

In Book Fourteen (The Age of Doubt), for example, two sentences in, and Salvo is already cursing the saints. In the fifteenth and latest novel, Dance of the Seagull, Salvo does not curse the saints until Page 104, and for me the deferred pleasure is like that gained by letting a vintage port age just a few years more. ("Cursing the saints" is translator Stephen Sartarelli's ingenious and entertaining rendering of an untranslatable Sicilian verb. In a comment to an earlier blog post, Sartarelli tells Detectives Beyond Borders the origins of "cursing the saints.")

Camilleri has said he "deliberately decided to smuggle in a critical commentary on my times," but the jabs, while sharper than ever, have become more human over time. The exasperated vitriol aimed at government and Mafia remains, but now laying bare more than in earlier books the human consequences of the misdeeds at which he rails.

Indeed, an increasingly human touch makes this one of the rare long-running crime series that arguably grow stronger with time. Camilleri was 68 years old when the first book appeared, and he recently turned 87. The titles available in English have taken Salvo from his forties to age 57, complete with amusing and touching descriptions of the aches and pains of aging.

In recent books Salvo has grown more tender toward his lover, Livia, and more appreciative of what his colleagues mean to him. In The Dance of the Seagull, the humanity takes the form of Salvo's new revulsion at the savagery whose results he witnesses as he investigates a pair of murders, and the introspection and empathy manifest themselves from the beginning. (The title refers to a seagull's dance of death that Salvo witnesses from his seaside home and that haunts him throughout the novel. Camilleri integrates the dream into the mystery more skillfully that he done in earlier books. He's beginning to get the hang of this Montalbano thing.)

Fans of the excellent Italian television series based on the Montalbano novels and starring Luca Zingaretti, telecast with English subtitles on MHz Networks and available on DVD, will enjoy this little argument between Salvo and Livia:

"`Well, I wouldn't want them to be shooting.' 

" `What are you talking about? Shooting what?' 

"`I wouldn't want to run into a film crew shooting an episode of that television series right as we're walking around there ... They film around there, you know.' 

"`What the hell do you care?' 

"`What do you mean, what the fell do I care? And what if I find myself face to face with the actor who plays me? ... What's his name—Zingarelli ...' 

"`His name's Zingaretti, stop pretending you don't know Zingarelli's a dictionary. But I repeat: What do you care? How can you still have these childish complexes at your age?' 

"`What's age got to do with it?' 

"`Anyway, he doesn't look the least bit like you.' 

"`That's true.' 

"`He's a lot younger than you.' 

"Enough of this bullshit about age. Livia was obsessed!"

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Political football: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and sports mysteries

When FC Barcelona's Jordi Alba scored the second goal in Spain's demolition of Italy at the Euro 2012 soccer championships earlier this month, and Andrés Iniesta, who also plays for Barcelona, was named the tournament's best player, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's friends, relatives, and readers must have smiled.

The late Barcelona-born crime writer was a huge fan of the soccer team, so huge that the FC Barcelona Foundation has sponsored a journalism award in his name since 2004. (Crime fiction readers may be more impressed that Andrea Camilleri named his protagonist Salvo Montalbano in homage to Vázquez Montalbán, possibly for the Spanish author's love of food as well as for his politics.)

Off Side, a 1989 novel first translated into English in 2000 and now reissued by Melville House, has protagonist Pepe Carvalho called in to protect FC Barcelona's newly signed English center forward against a death threat. (That probably dates the book because these days, English football is long on money but apparently short on world-class home-grown players. Top continental footballers are likelier to sign with English clubs than vice versa.)

Vázquez Montalbán was a sharp observer of the high and the low, and my favorite bit so far is of the high, namely of the Barcelona team's chairman at the news conference where the English star's signing is announced:

"He had been on the point of becoming, variously, a minister in the Spanish government, a councillor in the autonomous government of Catalonia, and mayor of Barcelona. At sixty years of age he had suddenly discovered tiredness, and a feat that this tiredness would cause him to disappear from the public stage that he had occupied continuously ever since he had become the great white hope of the progressive business community under Franco."

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While commuting home to my copy of Off Side, I browsed Murder in the Raw (also published as Ring Around the Rosa (1955) by William Campbell Gault, which begins thus:

"THERE IS AN OLD GRIDIRON WHEEZE that states a guard is only a fullback with his brains knocked out. I have met some rather bright guards and some extremely stupid fullbacks, but what is a fact measured against the generality? I’d played a few years of guard, myself, the more prominent years with the Rams and made a lot of friends in Los Angeles. So it figured that when the boys began to clobber me, Los Angeles was the logical place to open up a business."

Since fate has me reading about football on both sides of the Atlantic, I'll ask what your favorite crime novels set in the world of sports are. That may be tricky, at least for readers of American crime fiction. Sports was once a popular category of pulp fiction, alongside crime, military, romance, and adventure, but no longer. So, your alternate question: When did sports lose favor as a crime-fiction category, and why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Win Andrea Camilleri's latest (and give yourself one less reason to curse the saints)

Two sentences into The Age of Doubt, fourteenth of Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano mysteries and newly available in English, and Salvo is already cursing the saints:

"He had just fallen asleep after a night worse than almost any other in his life, when a thunderclap as loud as a cannon blast fired two inches from his ear startled him awake. He sat up with a jolt, cursing the saints."

That has long been Salvo's favorite expression of disgust as well as one of mine, and its occurrence this early bodes well for the book. Thanks to the people of Penguin, one lucky U.S. reader can win a copy of The Age of Doubt and curse the saints along with Salvo. All that reader has to do is answer the following question correctly:

What is Salvo's favorite restaurant? (Hint: The restaurant is named for a saint.)

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While you're scratching your head and cursing the saints, why not weigh in on your favorite invective in crime fiction, read my review of Camilleri's previous Montalbano book, or get hold of Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction, which includes an essay about Camilleri by your humble blogkeeper?

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We have a winner! Fred in Ohio knew that Salvo's favorite restaurant is the Trattoria San Calogero. He wins a copy of The Age of Doubt, just in time for several festivals of San Calogero in Sicily over the next few weeks. Felicitazióni e buon appetito. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Win a Camilleri library and stuff your face

The good people at Penguin are offering a big, fat prize in conjunction with the release of The Age of Doubt, fourteenth in Andrea Camilleri's series of novels about the splenetic, introspective, put-upon, food-loving police inspector Salvo Montalbano.

Enter by Tuesday to win all 14 Montalbano novels, plus a basket of food that just might divert Salvo's attention from the case at hand: pasta, sauce, olives, desserts, roasted red peppers, olive oil, and cheese. Visit this link for details: http://apps.facebook.com/penguinpaperbacks/Giveaways/Enter/3663

Now, if only they'd offer elocution lessons from Catarella as a prize.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

I have seen television's future ...

... and it isn't fucking Leave It To Beaver, now is it? Lots of viewers have apparently told BBC America just that, so it will be interesting to see if the cable channel continues its policy of bleeping out swear words from its broadcasts of The Thick of It.

I never watched this British political comedy/drama until Adrian McKinty's blog post yesterday about the bleeping; I've now watched all of Series 1 and a good chunk of Series 3 (in their uncensored versions). McKinty calls the show's invective "some of the best and most creative swearing that we've seen in the English language since Chaucer" and, while he unaccountably omits to mention Shakespeare, his head is in the right place.

The show, a purported look at the inner workings of the British government, is a symphony of swearing, with strings of ingeniously baroque invective from Malcolm Tucker, the brilliant and much-feared government communications director, punctuated by four-letter grace notes from him and the rest of the cast. The swearing is just part of the reason I'm more impressed by The Thick of It than by anything I've seen from Seinfeld, The Wire, The Sopranos or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

But I'm really here to ask for your favorite examples of published or broadcast fictional insult and invective. They need not involve sexual or bodily functions or even dirty words of any kind; one of my favorite invective set pieces in crime fiction is Salvo Montalbano's habit of cursing the saints at moments of tension in Andrea Camilleri's novels. That's up there with Thersites, the "deformed and scurrilous Greek" in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, whose lines include:

"I would thou didst itch from head to foot and I had the scratching of thee; I would make thee the loathsomest scab in Greece."

Those are my favorite examples; what are yours? And what distinguishes good swearing from tedious, offensive swearing in books, movies, and plays and on television?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Andrea Camilleri in my newspaper

My review of The Potter's Field, thirteenth of Andrea Camilleri's Sicilian crime novels about Police Inspector Salvo Montalbano and the first in which Salvo goes to bed with Ingrid, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Typically for a Montalbano novel,” I write, “the investigation becomes one of mob connections, heated emotions, and family secrets. But crime, investigation, and solution are the least of the Montalbano novels. Every word is a commentary, sometimes wry, sometimes righteously angry, sometimes touching, on the protagonist’s political, social, professional, and personal worlds. To choose just one typical example, `Ingrid’s husband was a known ne’er-do-well, so it was only logical that he should turn to politics.'”

Read the full review, and learn how to impress your server the next time you visit an Italian restaurant.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Andrea Camilleri, heart and sole

Andrea Camilleri and his Inspector Salvo Montalbano have come to feel like old friends whom I am always happy to see and to report on to our mutual acquaintances.

In The Potter's Field, thirteenth novel in the series, Salvo goes to bed with Ingrid.  Out of bed, his choice of reading matter, always a delight to Camilleri's readers, is a special treat this time. (OK, I'll give it away: Salvo, whose reading in previous novels has included Georges Simenon and Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, this time chooses a novel by Andrea Camilleri.) 

The political gibes, as barbed as ever, are delivered with greater concision even as they ripen into a kind of weariness at the state of the world, though the gibes are as funny as always.  Camilleri has deepened and mellowed his protagonist's view.

In previous books, this has taken the form of increasing tenderness in Salvo's regard for his distant lover, Livia. Here, he feels the pain of a friend's betrayal more sharply than a younger Salvo would have, and his kinship with his fellow creatures even turns him briefly off seafood after he admires the fish at an aquarium in Genoa. (Can I have veal milanese? he asks a waiter. "Sure," the waiter replies,  "if you go to Milan." Salvo settles for an excellent plate of fried sole.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

“Nerts, you're scared to.”

This post's title is a line from Raymond Chandler's story “Killer in the Rain,” much of which later found a home in The Big Sleep.

Chandler often reused characters and situations this way. Among other things, the practice encourages readers to compare the stories to the novels and to wonder, “What if Chandler had done things differently?"

“Killer in the Rain” includes the smut bookstore, the blackmail, the shooting on Laverne Terrace, the car plunging off the pier, and the wayward daughter readers will know and love from The Big Sleep. The young woman's name is Carmen in both versions. In the novel, she's Carmen Sternwood, daughter of Gen. Guy Sternwood, an oil millionaire. In the story the father is a more quintessentially American self-made man:

“Dravec, Anton or Tony. Former Pittsburgh steelworker, truck guard, all-around muscle stiff. Made a wrong pass and got shut up. Left town, came West. Worked on an avocado ranch at El Seguro. Came up with a ranch of his own. Sat right on the dome when the El Seguro oil boom burst. Got rich. Lost a lot of it buying into other people's dusters. Still has enough. Serbian by birth, six feet, two hundred and forty, one daughter, never known to have had a wife. No police record of any consequence. None at all since Pittsburgh.”

That's a character I'd like to have known more about.

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Sadly, nerts has lost the currency it enjoyed in Chandler's day. I'll try to say “Aw, nerts” at least once this month. Won't you do the same?

In the meantime, what expressions have found their way from your books into your vocabulary? I've always loved one picturesque way that Andrea Camilleri has his protagonist, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, express exasperation:

“The inspector cursed the saints.”

— The Wings of the Sphinx

“Cursing the saints, he flipped onto his back and did the dead man’s float.”

— Rounding the Mark

“Cursing the saints, he got up, went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and lathered himself up. All at once the water ran out.”

— The Snack Thief

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

California dreaming

I'm going to California (for Bouchercon 2010); Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Salvo Montalbano is doing the dreaming, in The Track of Sand, twelfth of the Montalbano mysteries to be translated into English.

Dream scenes in movies are generally embarrassments; in books they're merely obvious. But Camilleri, who often opens his novels with Montalbano waking in the morning, shows here that he knows how to write a dream. Montalbano's dreams here feel like dreams. It helps that the crime sets the story in motion is full of material ripe for dreams: a horse, a beach, sand (as in the stuff you get bogged down running in...slower...slower...sinking deeper).

So the dream can have something to do with the mystery Montalbano is trying to solve without being clunkingly obvious about it.

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Longtime readers of this charming series know that Camilleri likes to have Montalbano reading a mystery as he tries to relax. This time Montalbano thinks about Giorgio Scerbanenco; Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the creators of Martin Beck; and that newcomer Henning Mankell. Here's my favorite example:

"He got into bed and started reading one of the Swedish books he had bought. Its protagonist was a colleague of his, Inspector Martin Beck, whose manner of investigation he found very appealing. When he had finished the novel and turned out the light, it was four o'clock in the morning."

Readers for whom the running gag of Montalbano's inability to finish reading a Simenon novel in The Smell of the Night will find that especially noteworthy. I find it touching, and it's hard to imagine a warmer author-to-author tribute.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Following the Detectives is in my hands!

I can't review a book to which I contributed, but I can say that Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction manages the neat trick of offering information beyond the ostensible range of its subjects.

The book's core is twenty-one essays, each about a single fictional detective and the real city, country or region where he or she works. One of my assignments was Arnaldur Indriðason's Iceland, for instance, but a full-page insert tells the reader about Arnaldur's fellow Icelandic crime writer Yrsa Sigurðardóttir as well. That sort of efficient conveyance of information is a good idea for a book whose other crime-fiction destinations include London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Pretty hard to squeeze all the fictional detectives who call any of those cities home into a single essay.

The extras include maps, graphics, information boxes, guides to television and movie adaptations, walking tours, useful Web sites and, as an accompaniment to my essay on Andrea Camilleri, remarks on the history of Sicilian cuisine with explanations of some of Salvo Montalbano's favorite dishes. Pappanozza. Just the sound of it makes me hungry.

Here's a list of contributors and their fictional destinations:

Boston: Michael Carlson
Brighton: Barry Forshaw
Chicago: Dick Adler and Maxim Jakubowski
Dublin: Declan Burke
Edinburgh: Barry Forshaw
Florida: Oline Cogdill
Iceland: Your humble blogkeeper
London: David Stuart Davies
Los Angeles: Maxim Jakubowski
New Orleans: Maxim Jakubowski
New York City: Sarah Weinman
Nottingham: John Harvey
Oxford: Martin Edwards
Paris: Barry Forshaw
San Francisco: J. Kingston Pierce
Shropshire: Martin Edwards
Sicily: Your humble blogkeeper
Southern California: Michael Carlson
Sweden: Barry Forshaw
Venice: Barry Forshaw
Washington, D.C.: Sarah Weinman

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Order Following the Detectives here (free shipping!), from the publisher, here, here, or from an independent bookseller in the UK or Canada.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Crime-fiction team-ups

This news makes me wish I could read Italian better: Carlo Lucarelli (left) and Andrea Camilleri (right) have teamed up on a novel, Acqua in Bocca, that pairs Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano and Lucarelli's Grazia Negro.

Here's a clip of the two authors talking about their "romanzo a quattro mani" — their novel for four hands. The video is worth a look even if you don't understand Italian. But what is Camilleri doing puffing away on that cigarette? Doesn't he know smoking will shorten his life?

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I always liked comic-book superhero team-ups when I was a kid, but such pairings are rarer in crime fiction. Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice teamed their protagonists in the entertaining collection People vs. Withers and Malone in 1963, and Donald Westlake and Joe Gores shared chapters, in which both authors' cast of characters appear together in action included in novels by both writers.

What crime-fiction crossovers have you enjoyed? If you can't think of one, create your own. Which crime characters from different authors could work well together?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Sex for Salvo

What does the future hold for Salvo Montalbano? More sex.

Author Andrea Camilleri tells an Italian interviewer that as his protagonist moves into his sixties, after a life too full of nettlesome chastity, he realizes opportunities passed up may now be lost for good and so begins a much more active sex life.

In a metaphor that transcends barriers of language, Camilleri says Salvo will, "one might say, shoot his last cartridge."

That's just a livelier continuation of something the sensitive Camilleri has incorporated in novels such as The Wings of the Sphinx and The Patience of the Spider: Montalbano's increasing consciousness of his own mortality.

The interview is not all sex. Camilleri also talks about the friendly editorial blackmail that led him to continue the Montalbano series beyond Book Two, The Terra-Cotta Dog. (Eleven of the series are now available in English.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Join the cast!

Will you be in Ragusa today? If so, you can be an extra on Italian television's splendid Il commissario Montalbano television series, based on Andrea Camilleri's splendid novels. Details here.

If you're content to watch the series rather than appear in it, episodes are available in Italian on the RAI Web site or on DVD with English subtitles from the U.S. and Australia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Catarella highlight reels

Here's a special treat for lovers of Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano novels and stories and the Italian television series based on them: a series of Catarella highlight reels. Pay special attention to video 5, in which the soft-hearted, language-mangling Catarella turns hero.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Gli arancini di Montalbano

I haven't read the short story, as yet untranslated into English, on which this episode of the Italian Commissario Montalbano television series is based, but in some ways it's the most faithful to its source of the six I've seen.

One strength of Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano novels is their consistent articulation of a set of themes, and this episode, based on the story "Gli Arancini di Montalbano" ("Montalbano's Croquettes") highlights some of the most important.

Its politics duplicate Camilleri's political barbs. It weaves a comic dilemma through the tale, at each step heightening the humorous stakes for the harried protagonist. Most important, it captures the poignance of the series' best books. Resolution of its central crime reminds me, as especially poignant crime stories will, of the famous line from Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game: "You see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons."

Watch the climactic scene, without subtitles, of "Gli Arancini di Montalbano" here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Montalbano and the slip of the sheets

Thanks to resolution of technological and delivery issues, I'm again watching the Italian television series based on Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano novels.

The Snack Thief, from the book of the same name, offers something missing from the TV versions of The Shape of Water and The Terra-Cotta Dog: Montalbano dining at the Trattoria San Calogero. I'd wondered if the director had dispensed with such scenes as part of the trimming necessary when adapting a book. But a short scene at the San Calogero about a quarter of the way through this episode has all the easy intimacy and food-loving joy of the books.

One minus: Television is less able than books to supply information for a gastronomic illiterate like me, and I can't always tell what Luca Zingaretti, as Montalbano, is eating on screen. One plus: Perhaps better than books, television can convey the pleasure that Montalbano takes in his food even when eating alone.

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I complained in November about Katharina Böhm's performances as Livia, and comments on my post suggested interesting reasons for the complaint. Böhm gives a better account of herself in The Snack Thief, possibly because the story makes greater demands on her.

And a simple slip of the sheets in one of her scenes highlights a difference between Italy and America. Livia and Montalbano are talking in bed, and they are fully awake as they do so. That means they're sitting up rather than lying down, and that means none of that nonsense one gets on American television with the woman pulling the sheets up to cover herself.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Camilleri's Italian covers

My reading of and about Andrea Camilleri has led me to a Web site that offers a gallery of his Italian covers and links to tantalizing summaries of books not yet translated into English.

Camilleri's eleventh novel about Inspector Salvo Montalbano has just been published in English as The Wings of the Sphinx; the site offers covers and summaries of fourteen novels plus two collections of Montalbano stories, an omnibus edition and a non-Montalbano book.

One of the novels takes the investigation into Montalbano's beloved Mediterranean, "the most marine of Montalbano's investigations," according to Camilleri.

A collection of long stories, La prima indagine de Montalbano (Montalbano's First Investigation), takes the reader to a time when "Montalbano is 35 years old, an adult but still professionally naive and not so astute ..."

Now, there's something for Camilleri's readers to look forward to.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009