The Potter’s Field

An Inspector Montalbano Mystery by Andrea Camilleri 

The fictional Montalbano's home is just a few
yards from the sea on the Sicilian coast

As if investigating a suspected Mafia killing in atrocious weather isn’t difficult enough, Inspector Montalbano also finds himself having to solve the puzzle of the morose and quarrelsome behaviour of his friend and deputy, Mimì Augello, in this thirteenth novel in the police series set in Sicily.

After a terrifying dream in which the real-life Mafia boss, Totò Riina, has become prime minister and offers Montalbano the job of Minister of the Interior, the Inspector is woken by loud banging at his front door, where he finds one of his men, Catarella, who has come to his house to tell him about the discovery of a dead body. 

Under a relentless downpour, Montalbano and his men succeed in retrieving the body from where it has slid down a slope. It has been cut into pieces, put inside a bag and buried in a field of clay on the island, which is used by potters.

The Inspector has to find out the identity of the victim, why the body has been cut into 30 pieces and for what reason it has been left in The Potter’s Field. An added complication is a series of phone calls Montalbano receives from his long-distance girlfriend, Livia. Mimì’s wife, Beba, is in regular contact with Livia and has been telling her that Montalbano has been treating her husband very badly, requiring him to do regular all night stake outs, which is affecting their marriage.

Knowing there have been no recent all-night stake outs, the Inspector has no idea what is going on, but he allows Livia to believe that what she has been told is true to give him time to find out more about it. 

The Potter's Field is the 13th
Montalbano novel

He asks his Swedish friend, Ingrid, to follow Mimì to see where he goes at night, guessing he is probably seeing another woman. When Ingrid visits Montalbano’s apartment late at night to report back to him, the Inspector is terrified when the phone rings and it is Livia, who immediately senses someone is there with him.

The murder inquiry becomes more complicated when a beautiful South American woman comes to the police station to report that her husband is missing and Montalbano discovers that the man, a ship’s officer, just happens to be a distant relative of a local Mafia boss.

Discussing Mafia rituals with his officer, Fazio, leads to Montalbano recalling a passage from the Bible. He looks it up in the Gospel according to Matthew and reads the passage recounting the suicide of Judas, where he comes to the phrase ‘...the potter’s field to bury strangers in …’. 

Montalbano feels an actual shock go through his body as he finally has a clue about what lay behind the decision to cut the victim up in 30 pieces. 

But this time Montalbano not only has to solve a murder, he has to try to extricate Mimì from the trouble he is in. And he contrives to enable Mimì to take the credit for finding out who is responsible for the murder of the cut up body found in the potter’s field. 

It is a tall order, but Montalbano is cheered up by regularly eating at Enzo’s trattoria, where he consumes in just one of his meals whitebait, octopus, pasta with sea urchins and striped red mullet. 

He also finds the time to play a practical joke on his arch enemy, Pippo Ragonese, the top newsman at TeleVigàta. 

The Potter’s Field was first published in Italian as Il campo del vasaio in 2008. It was translated into English in 2011 by Stephen Sartarelli. I found it to be as ingenious as it was entertaining and would definitely recommend it.

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The Murdered Banker

The first Inspector De Vincenzi mystery by Augusto De Angelis

Augusto De Angelis's mystery The Murdered
Banker is set in the Milan of the 1930s

The Murdered Banker is a highly significant novel in the history of Italian crime fiction as it is the first detective story written by Augusto De Angelis, who is regarded by many as the father of the genre in Italy.

First published in 1935 in Italian as Il banchiere assassinato, the novel appeared at the peak of the British Golden Age of detective fiction, six years after Italian publishers Mondadori had launched their crime series in yellow (giallo) covers that would later result in the word gialli being used to refer to mystery novels and films.

There were no Italian authors on the first Mondadori list as the publishers did not see Italy as the right setting for the crime genre at that time.

However, journalist De Angelis did not agree, as he thought crime fiction was a natural result and product of the fraught and violent times he was living in and writing about.

To begin with, Mussolini and his associates approved of the crime fiction genre because it celebrated the achievements of the forces of order over evil and chaos by bringing about just solutions and restoring tranquillity. However, they eventually became wary of Italy being seen to be anything less than idyllic by the outside world.

The Pushkin Vertigo edition
of The Murdered Banker

The Murdered Banker was the first of 20 novels by De Angelis featuring Inspector De Vincenzi, which he produced over just eight years. De Angelis had a unique style and created a detective who could not have been more different from the eccentric and clever Sherlock Holmes and the methodical little Belgian, Hercule Poirot.

De Angelis is therefore seen as the father of Italian crime fiction. It is interesting to see how many of the traits of his protagonist have appeared in fictional Italian detectives since. De Vincenzi’s loyalty to his friends and care for his subordinates made me think of Donna Leon’s Brunetti. His disregard for the rules, unorthodox  behaviour and moments of inspiration also made me think of Michael Dibdin’s Zen and Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano.

The story starts on a foggy night in Milan, when De Vincenzi is on the night shift and is visited at his police station by an old schoolfriend, Giannetto Aurigi. While he is talking to his friend, who is clearly worried about something, he receives a call about a body being discovered in a house nearby and when he is given the address is horrified to discover it is in his friend’s apartment.

He goes on to discover that Aurigi owes a lot of money, which was due to be repaid that night, and that the dead body is that of the banker who lent it to him.

De Vincenzi feels he doesn’t just have to solve the crime, he has to prove his old friend is innocent of it and he has to do it quickly before the investigating magistrate becomes involved. He tells his friend that he has to tell him everything, or he could soon be facing the firing squad, but Aurigi just keeps repeating that he doesn’t know anything.

De Angelis wrote 20 Inspector De
Vincenzi novels in just eight years

Fortunately, there are plenty of other suspects, such as Aurigi’s beautiful fiancée, his future father-in-law, Count Marchionni, and the mysterious tenant living in the apartment above. De Vincenzi is determined to get to the truth and he lays a clever trap for the murderer.

Having visited Milan on many occasions, it was fascinating to read a novel set in the city in the 1930s, when gentlemen wore evening dress when they were out at night and treated La Scala almost like a club, where people in society could visit each other in their boxes during the opera.

The cultured and often emotional detective De Vincenzi became very popular with Italians, but the Fascist government considered his creator to be their enemy. De Angelis was arrested and imprisoned in 1943 accused of being anti-Fascist. He was released after three months, but was soon tracked down by a Fascist activist who beat him up so badly, the writer died of his wounds in 1944.

An English translation of The Murdered Banker by Jill Foulston was published by Pushkin Vertigo in 2016. 

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The Wings of the Spinx

An Inspector Montalbano Mystery by Andrea Camilleri

 

Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano stories are
set in southeast Sicily 

Inspector Montalbano is called in to investigate after the naked body of a young woman is found in a rubbish dump on his territory. She has been shot in the face and is unrecognisable, but there is a tattoo of a sphinx moth on her left shoulder.

Montalbano is struggling with his feelings about getting older and anxious that his long distance, but long lasting relationship with his girlfriend, Livia, is in trouble.

But he sets out to try to establish the victim’s identity, with the help of Mimì Augello, his deputy, and his loyal and hard working officer, Fazio.

The inspector soon discovers that there are three other young women in the area with the same tattoo on their left shoulders but they can’t help him identify the dead woman as they are all missing.

When his enquiries lead him to interview a Monsignor, the head of a religious charity, who says they rescued the girls from sex traffickers, the Inspector suddenly smells a huge rat.

But he is hampered in his work when he is hauled up before his boss, the Commissioner, who is angry that his questions have offended the Monsignor.

He is also under time pressure because he has promised to free himself from work to be able to spend some meaningful time with Livia.

It doesn’t help his mood that the weather is so bad the fishermen can’t go out to sea and day after day there is no fresh fish on the menu at Enzo’s Trattoria.

But Montalbano has to keep going, to get justice for the dead girl and to be able to free himself of the case to concentrate on his relationship with Livia.

He has just unmasked the killer and is on the way to the airport to meet Livia when someone else involved in the case is shot in the face.

He has to race against time to tie up the loose ends so he can hand the case over to the chief of the Flying Squad but still get the resolution he wants to achieve. There are many twists and turns and the suspense is maintained until he finally boards a plane to Genoa in his desperate pursuit of Livia to try to save their relationship.

But when he arrives at Livia’s apartment in Boccadasse, a village just outside Genoa, Montalbano gets a big surprise…

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More Montalbano stories reviewed:

August Heat

The Patience of the Spider

Rounding the Mark

More reading:

Andrea Camilleri profile and full list of Montalbano titles

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The Patience of the Spider

An Inspector Montalbano Mystery by Andrea Camilleri

Inspector Montalbano is recovering from a gunshot wound he sustained at the end of the previous book in the series, Rounding the Mark.

The Inspector was shot in the shoulder by a man involved in trafficking very young, third world children and so he had no hesitation in taking out his own gun and shooting the despicable individual dead.

The kidnap victim had set off for a friend's
house on her scooter but never arrived.

But Montalbano's recovery from the wound is taking some time as he is feeling the weight of his years and becoming more and more introspective.

He is being looked after at his beachfront home in Marinella by his long suffering girlfriend, Livia, and keeps suffering flashbacks to his time in hospital.

However his convalescence is rudely interrupted when Catarella, one of his officers, calls him from the police station and tells him there has been a kidnapping.

The girl was a student at Palermo University and had been out in the evening to a friend’s house to study. She had left her friend to travel home on her scooter early in the evening but had never arrived.

The case just doesn’t add up in Montalbano’s opinion as the family did not have much money, so he wonders why the kidnappers would bother with this girl.

As usual his sharp mind and understanding of human nature helps him get to the truth with plenty of wry humour and a generous helping of Sicilian cuisine along the way.

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Andrea Camilleri profile and full list of Montalbano titles

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The Shape of Water

The first Inspector Montalbano mystery by Andrea Camilleri

The Shape of Water introduces us to the squalor and chaos of Camilleri’s Sicily but also shows us its beauty and reveals the author’s love of the island.

The book starts, aptly enough, with the discovery of a body in a car by two garbage collectors.

Inspector Montalbano’s frustration with the legal and political system in Sicily, the every-day acceptance of corruption and the ongoing problems with the mafia are all vividly set out in the first few pages by Camilleri’s graphic prose, translated into English by Stephen Sartarelli.

Although the novel begins with a description of litter collecting by impoverished, unemployed, university graduates we are quickly transported to Montalbano’s house, which looks out over the sea and the San Calogero trattoria where he enjoys perfectly cooked dishes featuring locally-caught fish.

We learn about the Inspector’s complicated relationship with his girlfriend Livia, who lives in Genova, and his passion for literature and good food. We also find that despite Montalbano’s tough exterior he possesses a determination to get to the truth and a propensity to dispense his own type of justice, showing compassion and respect for vulnerable and honest people but no mercy at all for those who are greedy and immoral.

In this first Inspector Montalbano mystery, Andrea Camilleri serves up humour, local colour and an intriguing puzzle, spiced up with plenty of Sicilian cooking, which of course only leaves us wanting more.

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Andrea Camilleri profile and full list of Montalbano titles

(Sicily picture by Nicola Giordano from Pixabay)

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