Set in the fictional town of Vigata, Mr Camilleri was originally going to call his detective novel 'The Commissioner' but decided to pay tribute to Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, a Spanish author who wrote about investigator Pepe Carvalho. I took off that cork one year later and published another one with Garzanti, A Thread of Smoke, and since then I have never stopped." The name of 'Montalbano' "That book was like a cork from a bottle. "Then I became interested in theatre, as a director and then the theatre took my hand and I didn't write anymore (.)," Mr Camilleri said. "In '67 I started writing again, and I wrote my first novel, which I finished in 1968. "I started writing poems and short stories which got published on some of the main Italian newspapers, and even Ungaretti put me in his anthology of promising young poets. In 2015, Andrea Camilleri shared with us the story of him becoming a writer. “I remember when I won the part after six months of auditions, I returned home all happy and called some friends and everyone said, 'Don't you dare do it because you'll spoil the character.' They imagined him completely different." Speaking to SBS Italian in 2014, Luca Zingaretti admitted that when he was selected to play Inspector Montalbano, he felt many people doubted the choice. "Luca doesn't have the physique I would have expected for the role, but he is an extraordinary actor, and so he's believable - he is a perfect Montalbano." "A good actor is someone who makes you believe for two hours that he's the best Hamlet, even if he's 40 and he has a potbelly," Mr Camilleri said. Second, he's too young.'"īut knowing his acting talent, Mr Camilleri saw that Mr Zingaretti could pull it off. "The first impression was, 'But it is not my character! First of all, because he is bald, while my character has lots of hair. In the same interview in 2008, Mr Camilleri said he was not initially convinced by the director's choice of Luca Zingaretti to play Inspector Montalbano.
ĪAP Image/Camilla Morandi/IPA "My first impression of Zingaretti was 'this is not my character!'" "It's a bet with old age, for now, I'm winning, but let's see," he said. The moment I won't feel like writing Montalbano anymore or I'll get bored, I will tell you: 'publish that last novel'." I told him, 'Look, this is the last Montalbano, leave it there, in a drawer. "And so for fear that Alzheimer may catch me by surprise, I wrote this novel, the end of Montalbano, and I sent it to the publisher. "I am an orderly man and being 80 years old, then, I have no desire of leaving things half done.
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"I happened to write it almost four years ago, which is when it occurred to me how to end Montalbano," he said in 2008. In an interview with SBS Italian in 2008, Camilleri admitted he actually wrote the finale for Montalbano years earlier.
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The Montalbano series now runs to more than two dozen books and has been translated into 32 languages, with more than 30 million copies sold. In 1994, at the age of almost 70, he wrote The Shape of Water, the first book starring his now-famous Sicilian detective, Inspector Montalbano. Andrea Camilleri, one of Italy’s most popular authors and creator of the popular Inspector Montalbano series, died on 17 July 2019 at the age of 93.īorn in Porto Empedocle, in the province of Agrigento, on 6 September 1925, Camilleri worked as a poet, then as a theatre director and screenwriter/director for Italian state broadcaster RAI.