Riccardino by Andrea Camilleri

Between 1999 and 2021, the novels of Andrea Camilleri, featuring Inspector Montalbano, of the fictitious Sicilian town of Vigata, were presented in several successful TV series.

Like many contemporary mystery writers, Camilleri spices his work with trenchant political and social commentary, which often makes for hilarious reading.

This final Montalbano tale was planned when the author was 80. Designed as the swan song of the Inspector. Along with the author, both the novel and TV versions of him were getting tired.

Camilleri asked his publisher to keep this final Montalbano tale, in a drawer until after he was gone. He died aged 93 in Rome in 2019, and the book came out in 2020.

Employing the technique of metafiction, the author periodically shows up in the book, either on the phone or by fax, to urge Montalbano to finish and close the case. The Inspector, however, is unwilling to be censored. As always, he will do things his own way, and that means no overly lightweight motive for the killing. The policeman is determined to dig deeper and find our what the deceased man’s gang of friends is up to.

Early on, the readers learns that the jaded and aging Inspector Montalbano considers killers to be brain-dead “morons.” This includes “both the retailers, who kill out of greed, jealousy or revenge, and the wholesalers, who massacre in bulk in the name of freedom, democracy, or worse still, in the name of God himself.”

Montalbano has his own techniques for getting the guilty to implicate themselves, but sadly, the higher-ups keeps interfering with his investigation. Apparently the Commissioner is unconcerned by the mass disruption of the police investigation by gawking neighbours and rubberneckers who are snapping pictures and “filming the scene with those tiny little cell phones that nowadays even newborns know how to use.” He berates Montalbano for asking witnesses to come to the station for questioning.

When the Inspector singles out one friend of the victim to question, the scene appears farcical as the experienced policeman asks inane questions, mystifying the witness as he switches personae from a Jesuit priest to “an asshole cop in an American movie.” He also terrifies the victim’s friend by throwing in a few comments about the disruption and danger faced by witnesses who testify in Sicily.

The police come in for a certain amount of ridicule. A vice that Montalbano is incapable of resisting is the temptation to make fun of his superiors and fellow police officers. How fortunate, then, that the police Commissioner “considered himself too superior a man to imagine that anyone would make fun of him.” When Lattes, the commissioner’s assistant, asks for the umpteenth time after the family he’s forgotten that Montalbano doesn’t have, the inspector shocks him by making up a pack of lies about his nonexistent wife, saying “She lost her head over a Tunisian, a Muslim. …an illegal immigrant,” and took their children off to Hammamet with her new lover.

Even when facing the Undersecretary at the Ministry of Justice, he can’t stop himself from resorting to “mockery, derision and provocation.” This failure of self-restrain is habitual whenever he is “faced with the mockery, disdain, pomposity, false cordiality and rhetoric of this man’s ilk, who acted only out of self-interest while pretending to serve the common good.”

Churchmen as well as politicians are thoroughly raked over the coals. Conversing politely with a Bishop, the inspector momentarily wonders how this man is so involved in politics, then laughs at himself, thinking “Had he forgotten that priests had been running the country for centuries?” When the Bishop asks Montalbano to give written answers to some philosophical questions, the inspector knows he’s on dangerous ground. Since the clergy are known for the subtle and indirect way of communicating, Montalbano finds it necessary to bar himself in his office with coffee and a napolitano and carefully “translate” each question. Just as well he doesn’t act without thinking. Turns out this same priest, the uncle of one of the murder suspects, is the confessor not only of this nephew, but of his entire group of friends. What people confide to their priest, is of course, privileged, protected by the “secrecy of the confessional.”

Thinking about the power of priests, he asks himself rhetorically whether the current Minister of the Interior isn’t “one of those former Chistian Democrats” whom the priests, after “an unusual wave of arrests and convictions for kickbacks, bribery, corruption, graft and pork barrels” magically rehabilitated and “snuck…into the brand-spanking-new party now governing the country.”

Along with the more serious jokes about religion, politics, bureaucracy, and the Mafia, the reader is treated to some zany jokes — as when an order for a double espresso arrives in two cups.

There is also delightful humour in the byplay between the Author and the Inspector, where the former accuses the latter of refusing to follow along with his writerly plan, and the latter accusing the former of wanting to “screw the television character.”

Finding this final Montalbano so engaging, I am drawn to read the ones that preceded it, and perhaps to watch the TV series as well.