Montalbán and Montalbano

We’ve been travelling in Vietnam and Cambodia for a few weeks, a very stimulating and scenic experience which got me thinking about crime and mystery stories set in Third World countries. On board our cruise ship we saw a film of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American – a political thriller and mystery which utters a prophetic warning about the events that would unfold later in South East Asia, written in 1950. It quite destabilises the moral compass.

The other book that leapt to mind involving crime and the Third World was Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Buenos Aires Quintet, first published in Spanish in 1997. Montalbán’s private detective, Pepe Carvalho, who normally lives in Barcelona, is sent off to Buenos Aires in search of his cousin. ‘Buenos Aires is a beautiful city hell-bent on self-destruction,’ he is told. Amidst all the music, dance, exoticism and excitement of Buenos Aires, Carvalho discovers the long shadow cast by the tragic years of the military dictatorship in Argentina, still capable of threatening his life and the lives of others. Carvalho is no Philip Marlowe; rather he’s somewhat self-indulgent and his favourite activity is cooking, not to mention eating and not to forget womanising. He’s anti-intellectual, apolitical and anti-culture, but only because he’s eaten his fill of them – and found them wanting.
Yet politics permeates this bestseller. Montalbán, a lifelong socialist, reveals his empathy for the suffering masses of Buenos Aires as the regime murdered 30,000 of its opponents. This is an exciting and exotic read that changed my perception of Argentina.

And so to Montalbano – Commissario Salvatore Montalbano to give him his full title. Created by the Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri, Montalbano is Camilleri’s way of paying homage to his literary hero, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Despite this, Montalbano is no Carvalho. For a start, he’s a cop not a PI. He has a long distance romance with the beautiful Livia, to whom he manages to remain more or less faithful, despite numerous temptations. In some ways, Montalbano is more like Marlowe than Carvalho – he follows his own star of decency and honesty even when he clashes with his superiors. Avoid politics and be loyal to one’s vocation, is Montalbano’s stated policeman’s creed. And even though he loves fine food, he’s disciplined not self-indulgent.

The television series understates Montalbano’s anti-mafia sentiments and the social criticism which Camilleri brings out in the novels as he charts the course of Italian political and social development over the last twenty years. On the other hand the TV series emphasizes Montalbano’s steadfastness, his powerful analytical skills and his humour, along with his humanity.

I was surprised to learn that Camilleri did not write the first Montalbano novel until he was nearly seventy, and he’s still going at nearly ninety. There’s hope yet!

Camilleri won the 2012 CWA International Dagger (for translated crime). And, in a lovely touch, he recently won the Pepe Carvalho Prize for ‘noir’ fiction.

 David Kilner

www.davidkilner.com