A new book, La Stagione della Caccia ('The Hunting Season') turned out to be a best-seller. In 1992, after a long pause of 12 years, Camilleri once more took up novel-writing. Neither of these works enjoyed any significant amount of popularity. This was followed by Un Filo di Fumo ('A Thread of Smoke') in 1980. In 1978 Camilleri wrote his first novel Il Corso Delle Cose ('The Way Things Go'). In 1977 he returned to the Academy of Dramatic Arts, holding the chair of Movie Direction, and occupying it for 20 years. With RAI, Camilleri worked on several TV productions, such as Inspector Maigret with Gino Cervi.

His most famous works, the Montalbano series show many pirandellian elements: for example, the wild olive tree that helps Montalbano think, is on stage in his late work 'The giants of the mountain' As a matter of fact, his parents knew Pirandello and were even distant friends, as he tells in his essay on Pirandello 'Biography of the changed son'. Around this time he joined the Italian Communist Party.įrom 1948 to 1950 Camilleri studied stage and film direction at the Silvio D'Amico Academy of Dramatic Arts, and began to take on work as a director and screenwriter, directing especially plays by Pirandello and Beckett. Originally from Porto Empedocle, Sicily, Camilleri began studies at the Faculty of Literature in 1944, without concluding them, meanwhile publishing poems and short stories. He is considered one of the greatest Italian writers of both 20th and 21st centuries. With sly wit and a keen understanding of human nature, Montalbano is a detective whose earthiness, compassion, and imagination make him totally irresistable.Andrea Camilleri (born septemin Porto Empedocle) was an Italian writer. Montalbano’s passion to solve this old crime takes him on a journey through Sicily’s past and into one family’s darkest secrets. There, the inspector finds two young lovers, dead for fifty years and still embracing, watched over by a life-sized terra-cotta dog. Montalbano’s latest case begins with a mysterious tete a tete with a Mafioso, some inexplicably abandoned loot from a supermarket heist, and dying words that lead him to an illegal arms cache in a mountain cave. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the WindowĪndrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano has garnered millions of fans worldwide with his sardonic take on Sicilian life. Long live Camilleri, and long live Montalbano. Aglow with local color, packed with flint-dry wit, as fresh and clean as Mediterranean seafood - altogether transporting. Each novel in this wholly addictive, entirely magical series, set in Sicily and starring a detective unlike any other in crime fiction, blasts the brain like a shot of pure oxygen.

You either love Andrea Camilleri or you haven’t read him yet.

The Terra-Cotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri