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
