In his introduction to this squib in The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories, editor Otto Penzler says that “To describe it as trivial overpraises it. It is included here as a curiosity – nothing more.”

Small praise indeed! But understandable, given how slight a story it is. Its main claim to fame is that it was written by Winnie the Pooh author A. A. Milne, who was also a mystery writer himself. It was first published in October 1903, making it contemporary with Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Empty House,” which was the story that brought Holmes back from the dead. So here we have Holmes appearing to Watson like a ghost and explaining that he’d been in hiding since apparently falling from the Reichenbach Falls. The title has no relation to anything, not even Pope’s poem. As for Moriarty, “There is no such man. It is merely the name of a soup.”

That’s not much of a punchline, and it’s not much of a story. I include it here only as a curiosity.

Holmes index

I didn’t much care for The Snack Thief. There are actually a couple of different mysteries in it, hinging on the character of a Tunisian woman named Karima. The first mystery has to do with the murder of a merchant whose stabbed body is found in the elevator of an apartment building. It turns out that Karima was his mistress. The second mystery involves the killing of a terrorist, who happens to be Karima’s brother. Now the first mystery was the kind of thing I’d put more in the Maigret vein, involving different fraught family relations and a murder that was half an accident. The apartment building setting also put me in mind of Maigret. I thought this was interesting. The second mystery, however, was a complicated business involving Italy’s secret police and international intrigue. It all takes some time to explain in the end when Montalbano has a sit down with the nasty little guy who was behind the operation, and I didn’t like any part of it.

Now the two plotlines are connected, which is what confuses Montalbano, but whenever you have two stories like this and, as a reader, you find one is a lot more interesting than the other, you have a book with a problem. But I had other issue as well. As in The Terra-Cotta Dog Montalbano’s big crack in the case comes about entirely by circumstance, in a manner that reminded me of the boy seeing the photo of the police in the movie Witness. Then we have Montalbano’s character further developed through his relationship with Livia and (something new) his dying father, and though Camilleri does this to make him a very human and even relatable figure what this also means is that he comes across as a jerk a lot of the time. He’s nasty and mean (“ornery as hell” as one of his lieutenants buts it), vain, jealous of Augello, self-righteous, anti-social (a gourmand, he hates talking to anyone when he’s eating), and in the end not that interested in his job, which a perceptive old man tells him is his escape from reality. He likes to solve cases without any practical result, you see. Except, in this case, for himself.

Now you can say that a lot of famous fictional detectives are difficult types. Holmes. Poirot. Wolfe. But in all those cases the reader has a friend who is more likeable (Watson, Hastings, and Goodwin). In the Montalbano novels we’re stuck in closest proximity to Montalbano himself. This makes a difference and can be pretty uncomfortable.

So not the book I wanted it to be. I wanted the focus to be on the dead man in the elevator and got the terrorist plot instead. I wanted more about Montalbano’s relationship with his father and less about Livia adopting Karima’s son. I wanted to see Montalbano actually solving a mystery instead of getting lucky with clues being dropped in his lap. But having said all that, I still thought this was a decent story that did a lot to fill out Montalbano’s world and it kept me on the hook for what would come next.

Montalbano index