ROME — Americans have Philip Marlowe and Raymond Chandler. Britons have Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle. And Italians have Salvo Montalbano and Andrea Camilleri.
Camilleri, a bespectacled, gravel-voiced 83-year-old, has become a national character as beloved as his Montalbano, a shrewd, resolutely Sicilian police commander who solves crimes in the fictional town of Vigata.
Remarkably, Camilleri's career didn't take off until he was nearly 70, when he retired as a playwright and screenwriter. Since then, he has published an astonishing 40-plus books and sold 20 million copies internationally, inspiring a series of made-for-TV movies and, in Sicily, guided tours and a statue of his sleuth.
It's not unusual for Camilleri to have two or three titles atop European bestseller lists at once. In addition to the Montalbano mysteries, he writes works of historical fiction full of humor and a virtuoso command of dialect.
At an age when most people tend to focus on scheduling medical visits, he gets up every day at 6 a.m. in his comfortable apartment here, showers, dresses and gets to work. And enjoys himself enormously.
"I spent 30 years in television, theater, where you must have great physical energy," he says in a study decorated by images of comic-strip hoodlums. "In theater it's a 24-hour day. . . . I am accustomed to this kind of rhythm. In fact, writing relaxes me."
Craggy features, a bald dome and a longish fringe of white hair give the author the look of an ancient eagle. His speech and movements are jovial and deliberate. He's a chain-smoker, a habit he describes as "imbecilic."
"On the other hand, I have made it to 83," he says. "Maybe if I quit cigarettes today, I would drop dead."
Camilleri, the son of a coast guard officer, was born in Porto Empedocle in southwestern Sicily, near the ruins of the Greek temples of Agrigento.
Sicily's legacy
Despite stereotypes of the island, more than half of the best Italian writers of the last 120 years have been Sicilian, says Stephen Sartarelli, an American poet who is Camilleri's translator. They have included Nobel laureate Luigi Pirandello, a playwright, and Leonardo Sciascia, a cerebral, politically engaged novelist.
This is the result of a cultivated intellectual class, a folk-tale tradition and a dark reality that, as in Latin America or Russia, lend themselves to fiction, Sartarelli says.
