Andrea Camilleri, The Terra-Cotta Dog (1996, translated by Stephen Sartarelli in 2002).

            I spent a couple of weeks traveling in Sicily a few years back, and so I thought reading a Sicilian mystery there would be appropriate.  Andrea Camilleri wrote The Terra-Cotta Dog in 1996, and it was translated by Stephen Sartarelli in 2002.  Camilleri’s main character is Salvo Montalbano, a Sicilian police inspector in a town called Vigàta.  Vigàta is a wholly fictional town, but after the phenomenal success of Camilleri’s mysteries, his home town in Sicily, Port Empedocles near Agrigento, added Vigàta to its official name.   

            Montalbano is a very literate police inspector, and throughout the book there are references to his reading. He likes the Spanish mystery writer Vazquez Montalbán, whose name is the Spanish version of his own and whose mysteries, like Camilleri’s, also have many references to food and its preparation. But  Montalbano also reads Faulkner and quotes Shakespeare as well as other dramatists, perhaps because Camilleri taught for many years at a school of drama. 

            Montalbano, though he is companionable enough in other respects, likes to eat alone.  His housekeeper leaves him dishes in the icebox or in the oven: poached baby octopus, the casserole called pasta ‘ncasciata, anchovies baked in lemon juice, spaghetti with sardines, and other Sicilian treats.

            Montalbano and his associates are always worried about moles in their organization—mafia spies—and in fact there is a kind of cold war between the police and the mafiosi.  The factual basis of this struggle becomes apparent before one has even deplaned at the airport outside Palermo, which has been renamed Falcone-Borsellino Airport after the two judges murdered in 1992 for their anti-mafia activities.  Mostly the violence happens within the mafia, and there is a chilling indifference born of use with which the police regard the killings of one mafioso by another. 

            The plot is complex and begins with a well-known mafioso giving himself up to Montalbano. He wants the police inspector to stage the surrender as a surprise arrest.  The man’s associates are not fooled and they kill him, but before he dies, the mafioso gives Montalbano information about a large gun-smuggling operation.  Montalbano finds the cache of weapons, but nearby discovers a young couple, murdered fifty years earlier, just before the Americans entered Italy in 1943.  The fifty-year-old crime begins to consume Montalbano’s thoughts; he becomes obsessed with it in the way Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s inspector is obsessed with the murder of a little girl in The Pledge, a book that Montalbano thinks of in connection with his own obsession.  Unlike Dürrenmatt’s character though, Montalbano solves this one.  I think you might like it, but you might have to go to Sicily to get the full effect.

James Lee Burke, Jolie Blon’s Bounce (2002)

            James Lee Burke’s detective is Dave Robicheaux, who used to be a New Orleans cop but in Jolie Blon’s Bounce, the twelfth of the series about him, is a deputy sheriff in New Iberia, Louisiana. Robicheaux is a rule-breaker, full of suppressed violence from his time in Vietnam, who frequently takes the law into his own hands.

            In New Iberia, a girl is raped and murdered and a luckless black musician, a drug-addicted kid named Tee Bobby Hulin is found to have been at the scene of the crime. Dave Robicheaux doesn’t think he’s guilty and begins to investigate. He finds a sleazy club owner who seems to be exploiting Tee Bobby but who may be trying to protect him and his family. Then Robicheaux begins to explore that family itself, and he finds a Faulknerian tangle of black and white mischief, with a paternal plantation owner and a cruel overseer who starts out looking like a cliché and ends up convincing some New Iberians that he is the devil himself.

            Another murder up Bayou Teche in St. Martinville complicates matters. The murdered girl is the runaway daughter of a retired mafia hit man who not only begins to thrown his own weight around but brings in his formidable, private-investigator niece. The plantation owner’s son is the lawyer defending Tee Bobby, but Robicheaux gets less help from him than he does from the woman who is prosecuting the boy. She, by the way, is sleeping with Robicheaux’s ex-partner from his days as a New Orleans cop. Are you confused yet, or have we merely entered southern Louisiana?

            Dave Robicheaux is a man who feels out of place, even in his own skin. Detectives who know their territory but don’t quite fit in it are what’s needed to find the murderers, the greatest misfits of all. Murderers and detectives form a complementary pair, and the two of them are the only ones who can fully appreciate each other’s craft and sullen art.

            Jolie Blon’s Bounce gets its name from Tee Bobby’s own version, or “bounce,” of a Cajun song, “Jolie Blon.” This classic, often called the Cajun national anthem, is perhaps best known in the 1946 recording by the fiddler Harry Choates, who died in a Houston jail at the age of 29. But the song has had many bounces, notably by accordion player Nathan Abshire, by Doug Kershaw and Jimmy Newman, by Waylon Jennings and Buddy Holly, and by Bruce Springsteen. The wailing of the deserted lover for his pretty but unfaithful blonde is an apt theme song for the sad and violent tale that James Lee Burke tells.

The Detection Collection, edited by Simon Brett (2006)

The Detection Collection, published by St. Martin’s in 2006, is a group of eleven stories, written by as many members of London’s Detection Club.  The Club is a group of crime writers who gather for dinners three or four times a year at the Garrick Club or the Café Royal, where they talk shop and enjoy themselves.  At irregular intervals the members have collaborated on fiction projects.  In the thirties there were serial magazine stories and a murder novel, The Floating Admiral, in which each chapter was written by a different writer. Another collection, entitled The Verdict of Thirteen, came out in 1978.

Simon Brett, who edited this collection, concludes it with a brief history of the Detection Club.  Although he was the current president of the club, Brett seems oddly ill-informed about it: he doesn’t know precisely when it was founded—he thinks about 1928—and he thinks John Dickson Carr was “the only non-British author ever to have been a member,” even though he lists the Texas-born Patricia Highsmith as a contributor to the 1978 collection.  The best Golden Age authors were members, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and G. K. Chesterton.  The club has continued to attract the best British mystery writers.

P. D. James opens the book with a story that could as easily be classified as horror fiction as mystery; it’s a tale of revenge by one of the junior boys at St. Chad’s School against the upperclassman who tormented him, but this particular act of vengeance is deferred for forty years.

Michael Ridpath’s story is a clever one about a big banking outfit, a financial equivalent of John Grisham’s The Firm, that stages a murder to try to identify the best candidate to make partner.  The fake murder, of course, turns into a real one.

H. R. F. Keating’s contribution tells what happens when a man walks into his bathroom one morning and finds a third toothbrush next to his and his wife’s.

There is a contest for the most ingenious story in the collection between Colin Dexter and Robert Barnard.  Dexter’s story, called “Between the Lines,” is in the form of letters and diaries of three people who were present at a theft on board a train from Prague to Vienna.  Two of the three are fledgling authors who accuse each other of the theft in drafts of stories about the incident.  Only the third person, however, knows the whole truth.  Robert Barnard’s entry for most ingenious story is called “The Life-lie,” and in it a murder in the Norwegian town of Bergen at the turn of the twentieth century is solved by none other than the playwright Henrik Ibsen.  Barnard blends some historical fact with imaginative storytelling in this period piece.

Reginald Hill’s contribution features his regular, Detective Superintendent Dalziel of the Mid-Yorkshire Constabulary.  It’s a wicked little tale about a young man who should have known better than to try to involve Dalziel in his nefarious plans.

Most of the stories are cleverly plotted and move rapidly, using interesting, sometimes multiple points of view as well as letters, diary entries, and other plot devices.  If you enjoy British mysteries, I know there are some stories here you’ll like.