He talks with passionate enthusiasm about Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, 1957) he describes without hesitation as the 'greatest Italian novel of the 20th century'. Yet he has no illusions on the subject of literary fame. The most recent Montalbano mystery, La vampa d'agosto (August Blaze), in which his hero becomes perilously close to his enemies, came out in mid-April and has sold more than 500,000 copies.

His phenomenal success is the cause of much amusement to him. For more than three decades he has worked in Rome, where he still lives with his Milanese wife. Before then he had been an active member of the Communist party and a distinguished drama teacher and theatre director. In the small fictional Sicilian town of Vigàta, where Montalbano is based, the vilest things are seen to happen.Ĭamilleri, who was born in 1925 in Porto Empedocle, in the province of Agrigento, came to writing late, publishing his first book in 1978, when he was 53. A recent villain is a doctor in thrall to the Mafia, who provides them with human hearts, livers and kidneys.

The crimes are nothing if not topical: illegal immigrants, drug-peddling, prostitution, fraud and money-laundering. It was never Camilleri's intention to write more than a couple of Montalbano books, and only when the second and most original story, Il cane di terracotta (The Terracotta Dog, 1996), was greeted with enthusiasm by critics and readers alike did Camilleri decide to put his middle-aged policeman through all sorts of increasingly complicated criminal hoops. In 1994, however, he had invented Detective Inspector Salvo Montalbano in the novel La forma dell'acqua (The Shape of Water), and now both he and his hero are household names. A ndrea Camilleri is the most successful author in Italy, yet little more than a decade ago he was a virtually unknown septuagenarian who had written a handful of historical novels, including the intriguing Il birraio di Preston (The Brewer from Preston, 1995), set in his native Sicily.

The mystery of the terracotta dog