The Shape of Water

Andrea Camilleri

Crime fiction set in Italy has been in rude health in the last decade or so with Michael Dibdin and Donna Leon alone turning out over thirty books between them. But fans of the genre have now also discovered the more "autentico" voice of Andrea Camilleri, an Italian crime writer whose work began to appear in English in 2002. So popular is Camilleri's "Inspector Montalbano" series in his native Sicily and elsewhere in Italy that the "comune" on which Montalbano's fictional Vigata was based has now officially renamed itself in his honour. Either this is one hell of a popular author, or there's a corner of Sicily that badly needs more tourists.

In The Shape of Water a local dignitary is discovered dead in his car in a part of Vigata known as the "pasture". The area is notorious for prostitutes and drug dealers and although the deceased has been found with his trousers round his ankles the official cause of death is "natural causes". The authorities in Sicily want the embarrassing case closed as early as possible. Resisting pressure from above, Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano picks his way through a slew of false leads and what eventually emerges is an altogether stranger explanation for the grim discovery.

One of the features of a Camilleri novel which makes them so popular in Italy is the "dialetto siciliano" which sprinkles the text. I wonder if this element, necessarily missing in the English translation, explains why the novel was duller than I expected. Also, while the English translation is perfectly decent for the most part I was never convinced by the Sicilian "mannera" becoming "pasture" in English and since this key location cropped up time and again in the novel it became irritating. But in this list we're allowed to be niggled as far as translations go. Perhaps the word is untranslatable and the translator opted for what was the "least worst" choice.

Or perhaps I just found Montalbano a bit of a goody-goody and the supporting cast a little one dimensional. It doesn't help that the sex scandal on which the plot hinges, while perhaps deeply sensational and compelling if you're a Sicilian, is, well, in this country merely the stuff of your average Lib Dem press conference.

Still, it's probably worth sticking with Camilleri and hoping for something better next time. At least six of the Montalbano novels have been published in English and there are others still to come.