Andrea Camilleri death: Inspector Montalbano creator and Italian author dies, aged 93

Camilleri had been admitted to a hospital in Rome last month following a cardiac arrest

Author Andrea Camilleri in November 2018

The Italian author Andrea Camilleri, most famous for creating the best-selling Inspector Montalbano series, has died in Rome. He was 93.

A beloved figure in his native Italy, and often credited with popularising and celebrating Sicilian culture internationally, he had been suffering from ill health for many years, and most recently lost his sight. He had been hospitalised in recent weeks with heart problems and complications from a broken hip.

Italian television interrupted its programming this morning to announce the writer’s death.

Camilleri’s books – most set in his native Sicily – sold some 25 million copies in Italy, where literary best-sellers are usually measured by the tens of thousands. He had legions of readers overseas, too, thanks to the enduring popularity of his character, police chief Salvo Montalbano. Italian state TV versions of the series were so popular that even repeats consistently snagged the highest audience ratings. The shows were also exported to Latin America, Australia and across Europe.

His position at the top of the book sales charts in Italy – Camilleri often had several books high in the rankings in the same week – was even more remarkable because the author sprinkled many of his works with words that many Italians aren’t familiar with. He affectionately borrowed from the dialect of his Sicilian youth, which Camilleri saw as better lending itself to expressing characters’ emotions.

Camilleri employed a brilliant ear for dialogue, drawing on his many years as a theatre and TV director and scriptwriter before his literary career took off when he was approaching old age.

Indeed, TV adaptations of the Montalbano books used generous chunks of dialogue straight out of the printed pages, so smooth was the transition from book to screen.

“After 30 years in the theater as a director, dialogue for me becomes fundamental in the structure of the novel,” Camilleri told The Associated Press in an interview in his Rome apartment in 2009.

The shows hooked millions of viewers with picture-postcard views of Baroque Sicilian towns. Tourists vied for turns to eat in the seaside trattoria where scenes of Montalbano’s dining out were filmed. Between filming seasons, they traipsed through the beach town of Punta Secca to photograph the seaside house with inviting terrace where Montalbano “lived” and took dips in the same waters where the character swam to clear his head when sleuthing got heavy.

(Getty Images (Getty Images)

Camilleri’s books travelled well, dialect and all.

“I don’t believe there has ever been another Italian author with so many books translated into English” in just a few years, Harvard University Romance languages professor Francesco Erspamer said. Camilleri’s works were translated into some 30 languages, including Chinese.

While the Montalbano police stories shot him to fame, Camilleri was versatile in his output. Among his works are a fictionalized biography of Nobel laureate Luigi Pirandello, who was born not far from Camilleri’s hometown, and a dark novel about a sexually abused Sicilian boy’s childhood during Fascism.

He produced his 100th book in 2016, when he was 90. The plot of “L’altro capo del filo” (The other end of the thread), a Montalbano story, deals with the drama of thousands of migrants reaching Sicilian shores after rescue at sea. By the time he wrote it, poor eyesight had forced Camilleri to dictate his novels to his faithful assistant, instead of creating them on his typewriter, where he used to work every day from before dawn for three hours.

Additional reporting by Associated Press