Excursion to Tindari is the fifth Salvo Montalbano novel and anyone reading them in order would probably have been noticing some common features that many of the books share. Two I’ll flag here are an interest in “transgressive” sexual acts and a double plot.
In the first instance, I put “transgressive” in scare quotes to indicate that what was considered risqué in 1990s Sicily plays pretty tame today. In The Shape of Water an older man has an affair with a young man who dresses up as a woman. I don’t know if this was the kinky part though, or if it was the fact that the youth is the old man’s nephew. In Voice of the Violin anal sex raises an eyebrow. In this book a big clue is that a woman shaves her pubic hair and she and her boyfriend make dirty movies. But I think most of this would be considered vanilla today.
As for double plots, in The Snack Thief there’s a man found stabbed dead in an elevator and a shootout on the high seas, and Montalbano has to find the connection. In The Terra-Cotta Dog there’s the theft of a grocery truck and the discovery of a pair of bodies that have been sealed up in a cave for forty years. And in this book it’s the murder of a man outside an apartment building and the apparently unrelated disappearance at the same time of an elderly couple who lived in the same building. Camilleri seems to have enjoyed these kind of set-ups.
I wish there’d been more made out of the apartment building. Simenon has several Maigret mysteries that are set in such buildings and you can have a lot of fun with the idea. But despite introducing the different tenants nothing much is done with any of them.
The broader story of the Vigàta police department isn’t advanced much either, though it is deepened. We learn, for example, that Montalbano is fifty years old and Augello is thirty. And while these two are often at each other’s throats this was the first book that we get to see some real affection between them. Maybe it’s just a Sicilian thing the way they talk to each other, and indeed how they behave to each other. Montalbano is heartbroken that Augello may be leaving the squad to get married to a girl who lives in Pavia. He even breaks down in tears when alone. But then he decides that the way to keep Augello with him is to sabotage his engagement by introducing him to a bombshell of a local girl. Which is both sweet and kind of shitty. But Montalbano is at least aware of his shortcoming, thinking to himself “You’re such an asshole, Salvo!”
Livia (Salvo’s mistress) doesn’t put in an appearance, only getting called up a couple of times. There’s no further mention of the kid they were going to adopt together and when Salvo tells her he loves her it’s only to get her off the phone as quickly as possible. He’s that kind of guy. The oily mafia lawyer Guttadauro looks to be turning into a recurring character, which is nice because he’s fun. And there’s a lot more eating. I couldn’t picture the dishes he was going through but I did find out that “Eating at eight o’clock in the evening was for the Milanese; Sicilians don’t start thinking about dinner until after nine.” I don’t think I could handle life in Sicily with those kind of hours. An honest man should be in bed by nine.
The explanation for what’s going on here is complicated and I’m not sure how Montalbano figures it out. He seems to just sense his way to solutions. In this one a tree helps him. But maybe his being such a well-read fellow comes in handy too. I registered my surprise that he’d read Faulkner’s Pylon five times when that came up in The Terra-Cotta Dog, and in this book he continues to amaze. He quotes Shakespeare saying “These words content me much.” Do you know what play this line comes from? If you told me you did, I wouldn’t believe you. They’re from Henry VI Part 2. Then later he quotes Gertrude Stein and is guided subconsciously to solve the case by a memory of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which he has on his bookshelf at home. This made me wonder if he had an Italian translation or if he was reading all of these books in the original English. Maybe I’ll find out at some point. In the meantime, I also flagged how Montalbano has an interest in the reputation of mystery fiction (which he also reads a lot of). He’d even write mystery novels himself, but as he explains to Augello it wouldn’t be worth it “Because certain critics and professors, or would-be critics and professors, consider mystery novels a minor genre. And, in fact, in histories of literature they’re never even mentioned.” So he’s not just reading a lot of literature across all ages and genres, but reading histories of literature as well. What a guy.
