Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories Read online

  Praise for Andrea Camilleri and the Montalbano Series

  “Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano mysteries might sell like hotcakes in Europe, but these world-weary crime stories were unknown here until the oversight was corrected (in Stephen Sartarelli’s salty translation) by the welcome publication of The Shape of Water . . . This savagely funny police procedural . . . prove[s] that sardonic laughter is a sound that translates ever so smoothly into English.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Hailing from the land of Umberto Eco and La Cosa Nostra, Montalbano can discuss a pointy-headed book like Western Attitudes Toward Death as unflinchingly as he can pore over crime-scene snuff photos. He throws together an extemporaneous lunch of shrimp with lemon and oil as gracefully as he dodges advances from attractive women.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “[Camilleri’s mysteries] offer quirky characters, crisp dialogue, bright storytelling—and Salvo Montalbano, one of the most engaging protagonists in detective fiction . . . Montalbano is a delightful creation, an honest man on Sicily’s mean streets.”

  —USA Today

  “Camilleri is as crafty and charming a writer as his protagonist is an investigator.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Like Mike Hammer or Sam Spade, Montalbano is the kind of guy who can’t stay out of trouble . . . Still, deftly and lovingly translated by Stephen Sartarelli, Camilleri makes it abundantly clear that under the gruff, sardonic exterior our inspector has a heart of gold, and that any outburst, fumbles, or threats are made only in the name of pursuing truth.”

  —The Nation

  “Camilleri can do a character’s whole backstory in half a paragraph.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Subtle, sardonic, and molto simpatico: Montalbano is the Latin re-creation of Philip Marlowe, working in a place that manages to be both more and less civilized than Chandler’s Los Angeles.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Wit and delicacy and the fast-cut timing of farce play across the surface . . . but what keeps it from frothing into mere intellectual charm is the persistent, often sexually bemused Montalbano, moving with ease along zigzags created for him, teasing out threads of discrepancy that unravel the whole.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Sublime and darkly humorous . . . Camilleri balances his hero’s personal and professional challenges perfectly and leaves the reader eager for more.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “The Montalbano mysteries offer cose dolci to the world-lit lover hankering for a whodunit.”—The Village Voice

  “In Sicily, where people do things as they please, Inspector Salvo Montalbano is a bona fide folk hero.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “The books are full of sharp, precise characterizations and with subplots that make Montalbano endearingly human . . . Like the antipasti that Montalbano contentedly consumes, the stories are light and easily consumed, leaving one eager for the next course.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “The reading of these little gems is fast and fun every step of the way.”

  —The New York Sun

  Also by Andrea Camilleri

  Hunting Season

  The Brewer of Preston

  THE INSPECTOR MONTALBANO SERIES

  The Shape of Water

  The Terra-Cotta Dog

  The Snack Thief

  Voice of the Violin

  Excursion to Tindari

  The Smell of the Night

  Rounding the Mark

  The Patience of the Spider

  The Paper Moon

  August Heat

  The Wings of the Sphinx

  The Track of Sand

  The Potter’s Field

  The Age of Doubt

  The Dance of the Seagull

  Treasure Hunt

  Angelica’s Smile

  Game of Mirrors

  A Beam of Light

  A PENGUIN MYSTERY

  © Elvira Giorgianni

  MONTALBANO’S FIRST CASE AND OTHER STORIES

  Andrea Camilleri, a bestseller in Italy and Germany, is the author of the popular Inspector Montalbano mystery series as well as historical novels set in nineteenth-century Sicily. His books have been made into Italian TV shows and translated into thirty-two languages. His thirteenth Montalbano novel, The Potter’s Field, won the Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger award and was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

  Stephen Sartarelli is an award-winning translator and the author of three books of poetry.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 1998, 1999, 2002, 2008 by Mondadori Libri SpA, Milano

  Translation copyright © 2016 by Stephen Sartarelli

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  “The Artist’s Touch” appeared in the volume Un mese con Montalbano (Mondadori, 1998); “Catarella Solves a Case” in Gli arancini di Montalbano (Mondadori, 1999); and “Montalbano Afraid” in La paura di Montalbano (Mondadori, 2002). The other stories were published in Racconti di Montalbano (Mondadori, 2008).

  eBook ISBN 978-1-101-99216-6

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Camilleri, Andrea, author. | Sartarelli, Stephen, 1954– translator. |

  Camilleri, Andrea. Racconti di Montalbano. English.

  Title: Montalbano’s first case and other stories / Andrea Camilleri ;

  translated by Stephen Sartarelli.

  Other titles: Montalbo’s first case.

  Description: New York, New York : Penguin Books, 2016. | “Originally

  published in Italian as Racconti di Montalbano by Arnoldo Mondadori

  Editore SpA, Milano” — Verso title page.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015037837 | ISBN 9780143121626 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Montalbano, Salvo (Fictitious character)—Fiction. |

  Detective and mystery stories, Italian—Translations into English. |

  Police—Italy—Fiction. | Sicily (Italy)—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION /

  Mystery & Detective / Short Stories. | FICTION / Short Stories (single

  author). | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ4863.A3894 A2 2016 | DDC 853/.914—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design and illustration: Andy Bridge

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for Andrea Camilleri and the Montalbano Series

  Also by Andrea Camilleri

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Au
thor’s Preface

  Montalbano’s First Case

  Fifty Pairs of Hobnailed Boots

  Neck and Neck

  Fellow Traveler

  Dress Rehearsal

  Amore

  The Artist’s Touch

  Montalbano’s Rice Fritters

  As Alice Did

  The Pact

  Mortally Wounded

  Catarella Solves a Case

  Being Here . . .

  Seven Mondays

  Judicial Review

  Pessoa Maintains

  The Cat and the Goldfinch

  Montalbano Says No

  A Kidnapping

  Montalbano Afraid

  Better the Darkness

  Notes

  Preface

  The task of creating a sort of personal anthology from all of the short stories I have written was almost enough to drive me to despair. I did once edit a volume of selected writings of a great author, but working in another’s skin is always easier.

  The problem that immediately arose was that my first book of short stories, Un mese con Montalbano (A Month with Montalbano), was published by Mondadori in May 1998, when four novels with Montalbano as their protagonist had already come out, and the character had therefore already had the time and opportunity to attain a certain completeness.

  In other words, in these stories, Montalbano appears as an already developed, well-defined character, and thus I do not have the option of discarding any stories still weak or uncertain in design. They are all, from this point of view, written on the same terms.

  I should also add that twenty-seven of the thirty-nine stories that appeared in that first volume had been written for the occasion, and that there was a precise but unstated intention guiding their creation.

  This intention was to compose a series of “portraits” of Sicilian characters, and therefore the stories didn’t necessarily have to revolve around murders but could also concern investigations into memory, false robberies, conjugal infidelities, petty vendettas, and so on. I used the “police procedural,” in short, only as a pretext.

  I followed the same guidelines with the twenty stories in the second short-fiction collection, Gli arancini di Montalbano (Montalbano’s Rice Fritters), published in September 1999. Here, too, the more or less “procedural” circumstances served as a springboard to explore characters, settings, and situations.

  Things, in part, changed substantially, and I would say even visibly, with the third volume, La paura di Montalbano (Montalbano Afraid), published in May 2002. Here, while the three shorter stories followed the guidelines of the first two collections, the three longer stories were no longer a pretext, but revolved around bona fide police investigations, however sui generis at times (but this is in the nature of Inspector Montalbano himself).

  The fourth and final volume, La prima indagine di Montalbano (Montalbano’s First Case), published in April 2004, brought together three long investigations, none of which stemmed, however, from murders.

  These guidelines made the process of selection even more difficult, owing to a curious—at least to my eyes—interchangeability between one story and another.

  I must, moreover, confess that none, not a single one, of the stories of Montalbano was written without a specific prompting—or even necessity, I am tempted to say. Writing just for the sake of writing is not my sort of thing. I would even say I’m incapable of it. And this, at the moment of selection, created an additional problem.

  There was no problem whatsoever, on the other hand, from an affective point of view, so to speak. Many writers claim they consider their works as their “children.” This is not the case with me. I make a clear distinction between children and books, in favor of the former. Anyway, with the fifty-nine stories that make up the four Mondadori volumes as well as twenty-one Montalbano novels, I would be in a position to beat out a biblical patriarch!

  Well, after having beaten around the bush, I’ve run out of subjects and now have no choice but to enter the quicksand of reasons for accepting some stories and rejecting others.

  Three preliminary statements.

  I want to emphasize further—since it seems rather clear to me in the prior paragraphs—that the stories included are not intended to be an “elite” or “best of,” because it’s quite possible they’re not. Second, I am also keen to point out that the order in which the stories are presented in this anthology does not respect the chronology of the publication dates. For example, I open the collection with a story that is in fact the one written most recently of all. Third, this is a book necessarily consisting of a certain number of pages, since if there were any more, it would become unwieldy. My ideal personal anthology would have included a few more stories.

  So, to be brief: There are twenty-one stories here.

  The first one features Montalbano’s first case and opens when he is still a deputy inspector, not yet with Livia, and dreams of being transferred to a seaside town like Vigàta. The first time that Montalbano ever appeared in print was in the novel La forma dell’acqua (The Shape of Water), published in 1994, and in that book he’s forty-four years old, has already been Chief Inspector of the Vigàta Police for some time, and is very much with Livia.

  Well before the readers started wondering, I had begun to ask myself: What did Montalbano do before coming to Vigàta? I answered myself in those pages.

  And, in fact, almost all of the stories collected here try to answer questions I had, or to settle bets I had made with myself, or treat narrative problems I had set for myself.

  I hardly intend to specify, story by story, the reasons for my choices, but, as the reader will already have gathered, there are two main threads: one that favors situations not specifically procedural, and one that, while treating material of a clearly procedural stamp, very often arrives at conclusions that underscore the inspector’s humanity more than his rigor in seeing that the law is respected.

  One such story, for example, is “Fellow Traveler,” about which I’d like to say a few words. In 1997, I think, I was invited by the organizers of “Noir in festival,” at Courmayeur in Northwest Italy, to write a short story that would be read during an encounter with a French mystery writer who, in turn, would read a story of his own, written for the occasion. Well, my story was read first. And I didn’t understand why, during the reading, the French writer kept looking at me with increasing astonishment. Then it was his story’s turn. And it was I who was profoundly astonished. Because the stories were essentially the same: Both unfolded inside a railway sleeper cabin with two beds, one occupied by a police inspector, the other by a killer. Those present at the conference didn’t want to believe that it was a coincidence; they were convinced that the French writer and I had worked it out together. But in fact we had never met or spoken before then. At a certain point, Ed McBain stood up and explained the mystery in his own way, by claiming that, since we were both European writers particularly attentive to the psychology of the characters, as opposed to their actions, it was inevitable that we should both end up having the policeman and the killer meet face-to-face in an ideal space such as a stifling sleeping compartment.

  Finally, a few words about another story, “Montalbano Says No,” which ends with the inspector making a late-night phone call to me, his author, in which he tells me in no uncertain terms that he refuses to continue the investigation into which I’ve thrust him. This was the time of the so-called cannibals of contemporary Italian fiction, who scorned my writing for what, they accused, was “feel-goodism,” and I decided to respond. But for me that story is still very relevant, and is, in fact, a sort of manifesto. A refusal, that is, to delight, narratively, in violence.

  And that’s all. Happy reading.

  Andrea Camilleri

  MONTALBANO’S FIRST CASE

  1

  It was by rather circuitous ch
annels, through a sort of prediction, that Montalbano learned of his forthcoming promotion to the rank of inspector exactly two months before the official, stamp-covered announcement.

  Indeed, in every self-respecting government office, predicting (or forecasting, if you prefer) the more or less imminent future of every element of said office—and all neighboring offices—is a common, daily practice. There is no need, say, to examine the entrails of a quartered animal or to study the flights of starlings, as the ancients used to do. Nor is there any need to read the patterns of coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup, as we have been known to do in more modern times. And to think that in those offices, whole oceans of coffee are drunk each day . . . No, for a prediction (or forecast, if you prefer) to be made, a mere word, casually dropped, a hint of a glance, a subdued whisper, or the first, upward movement of an eyebrow about to be raised is quite enough. And these predictions (or forecasts, etc.) concern not only the career trajectories of bureaucrats—transfers, promotions, reprimands, citations of merit or demerit—but often involve their private lives as well.

  “In three weeks, at the very most, Falcuccio’s wife is going to cheat on him with Stracuzzi, the consultant,” Piscopo the accountant says to Dalli Cardillo the surveyor while watching their colleague Falcuccio head for the toilet.

  “Really?” the surveyor queries in puzzlement.

  “I’d bet the house on it.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Just take my word for it,” Piscopo the accountant says with a grin, tilting his head to one side and putting his hand over his heart.

  “But have you ever seen Mrs. Falcuccio?”

  “No, I haven’t. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I know her.”

  “So?”

  “She’s fat, Piscopo: fat, hairy, and practically a dwarf.”

  “So what? You think fat, hairy women who are practically dwarves don’t have the same thing between their legs as all the rest?”

  The beauty of it all is that, without fail, seven days after this exchange, Signora Falcuccio ends up in the spacious, wifeless bed of Stracuzzi the consultant, moaning with pleasure.