Andrea Camilleri and Montalbano

Until he was almost 70, Camilleri was a minor historical novelist who was better known as a director of Pirandello. He was an author in search of a character, and that character turned out to be Montalbano. When a protagonist becomes a phenomenon, I am always interested in whether the novelist remembers the exact moment of conception. Camilleri did: "I know exactly when he arrived. In 1994, I was stuck on a historical novel called The Brewer of Preston. I couldn't organise it the way I wanted, I had not found the key to structure it, and then decided that the best solution was to set it aside and write something else. And then I said to myself: what can I write? The way I used to write novels was to start with the very first thing that struck me about a subject. It was not methodical: the first thing I wrote would never be the first chapter, maybe it would become the fourth or fifth chapter. Then I said: but you can write a novel from first to last chapter with a perfect order of logic. I saw the form of the thriller as a cage that does not allow you to escape. And so I began to write the first Montalbano novel – The Shape of Water."

Originally, the central detective was called simply The Commissioner, but Camilleri was conscious of being influenced by the Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who wrote a series about the investigator Pepe Carvalho, and so he baptised his new character in gratitude; serendipitously, Montalbano is a common Sicilian surname. Camilleri felt finished with the story after a second novel, The Terracotta Dog, but, he explained, "I kept receiving calls from my publisher bombarding me with 'Oh no, you must give me another Montalbano' – and that's how the story of Montalbano started."

Serialised worldwide and translated into almost every language in the world, and of course a wonderful TV series itself spawning the wonderful ‘Young Montalbano’ ,we now have seen of the great characters in world literature continue to evolve before our very eyes. Please read these wonderful books and be entranced by Camilleri’ s creation…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Camilleri

https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/crime-thriller/inspector-montalbano-series-in-order-camilleri