Andrea Camilleri has written ten Inspector Montalbano mysteries and I read The Patience of the Spider yesterday for my Sunday mystery series.  Set in Sicily and with a grumpy, aging and very clever police inspector, Camilleri provides everything I love in a mystery:  good setting with lots of details of landscape and food; a variety of characters that are interesting as well as indigenous to the location or historical moment (not the everyman but the particular man to give me an idea of what people in a certain time or from a certain place are like); a  twisted plot; and a brainy, rebellious hero.

The setting is Sicily, in a fictional town based on Agrigento.  The hills and valleys of the area, the ancient Greek ruins, the villas in the country and the apartment houses in the town, all are evoked by Camilleri.  There is one very funny scene when Inspector Montalbano goes to a village divided by an earthquake: those fleeing the effects of the quake have moved down the mountain but a few old timers hang on uphill.  To get there Montalbano has to take “a road that consisted of one sharp turn after another and looked like the X-ray of an intestine…” and when he arrives, he finds a cluster of houses that would make  “an Expressionist set-designer’s day.  Not a single house stood straight.  They all leaned to the left or the right at angles so extreme that the Tower of Pisa would have looked perfectly perpendicular by comparison.  Three or four houses were actually attached to the hillside and jutted out horizontally, as if they had suction cups holding them in place….“  I am told there really are villages like this in Sicily, holding on by their fingernails, waiting for the next tremor to go toppling downhill.

In addition to the architectural tour, Camilleri gives us the details of plenty of good Sicilian meals as well: sweet-and-sour rabbit cooked with vinegar and honey and caponata (seasoned eggplant, olives, and tomatoes); couscous with eight kinds of fish (can you even name eight kinds of fish?), pesto alla trapanese (made with almonds instead of pine nuts), and caciocavallo cheese.  Inspector Montalbano is on the mend from a gunshot wound, treatment of which uncovered his scarred heart, and now he is on a low-salt, low-taste diet.  Nevertheless, he indulges himself with good, rich food whenever he can (out of sight of his girlfriend), and even takes to smoking again, as needed.

The characters of the book range from young to old, innocent to corrupt, peasant to gentry, and everyone has a part to play in the plot of kidnapping and revenge.  There are no cold fish in this book, everyone is passionate about something and the emotion is infectious. I was quite as worked up as the crowds going for the blood (and trucks and wife) of the uncle — and godfather — who appears to be refusing to pay a kidnapper’s ransom demand.

The plot is as complex as the web of  a patient spider (hence the tile of the mystery) and I loved reading through it even after I’d figured it out (the title is a hint). I watched (read) as the plot unraveled, the web fell part, and the revenge, although effective, turned around and wrought its own price on the avenger, as it usually does.  Montalbano’s only hope at the end is that through his intervention he can save two young people from carrying the load of the revenge all of their lives and that they can instead find their way back to each other.  Quite the softie, after all, is our tough old Inspector Montalbano.

And so Montalbano proves his facility for compassion as well as mystery-solving. I love that combination in my mystery heroes, the brain plus heart.  Good examples of this type are Adam Dalgiesh of P.D. James’ mysteries, Donna Leon’s Comissario Brunetti , and Martha Grimes’ Richard Jury. It is that combination of brain and heart that makes these characters rebels as well: even if they are within the crime-fighting establishment, they are outside of its rules and regulations.  They do what they feel is right, a kind of taking the law into their own hands but it is on the side of mercy, and not of vengeance.  I suppose it would be difficult to have an entire police force  operating along those lines.  But I do hope there really are those within and outside of the system who use mercy as much as, or even more than, justice when facing the weaknesses of man.

The Patience of the Spider was translated by Stephen Sartarelli.