Skip to main content

Mystery review: The Terracotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri

Original Italian title: Il cane di terracotta
Translator: Stephen Sartarelli (2002)
Genre: Mystery
Year of publication: 1996
No. in series: 2
Series detective: Inspector Salvo Montalbano
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: Sicily, Italy; 1993

Story:
When working on a case, Inspector Montalbano discovers a sealed-off cave and inside it the dessicated bodies of two young people, murdered 50 years before. The bodies have been ritualistically surrounded by a life-size terracotta dog, a water jug and a bowl of money. While on sick-leave, Montalbano has time to investigate the case and makes some interesting discoveries.

Review and rating:
As with the previous books I read by Camilleri, I found this one to be a good mixture of skilful writing and plotting and great storytelling. Combined with the humour, some quite poignant but never sappy scenes and some of the most mouthwatering descriptions of food I have read in any mystery, it makes for great reading.
And of course there is Montalbano. He is far from being perfect, but it is exactly his flaws that make him more human and endearing than many other detectives. He is, I think, a good example of how a character’s flaws can be used to make him come alive on the page.

The mystery itself is a bit lame, but the way that Montalbano finally solves the final part of the riddle is ingenious, and somehow I can easily imagine his gambit working in Italy, simply because the Italians seem to have such a highly developed appreciation for melodrama.

Stephen Sartarelli’s translation is excellent, by which I mean that it reads like the text was written in English but still retains an Italian flavour. The list in the back of the book, of terms and other stuff that needs explaining, is useful but at the same time unobtrusive so that one doesn’t feel like one has to read it.

Highly recommended. 4 stars.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hey bibliophile,
I just recently found your blog and I enjoy it a lot!
I'm glad you reviewed a couple of Camilleri's books as I was thinking of trying one.
By the way, did you know that Camilleri named his hero, Montalbano, in tribute to Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán? VM also wrote murder mysteries (among others things). They feature a P.I. called Pepe Carvalho who lives and works in Barcelona. I'm currently reading a Carvalho for the first time, and I like it... up until now. Can't wait to see how it ends!
I'll be back to read your very interesting blog for sure, bibliophile.
Thanks,
luciek
Bibliophile said…
Luciek, I did know about the Montalbán connection. Camilleri makes it quite clear in this book, as Montalbano is actually reading a Carvalho book early on in the story.

The one Carvalho book I have read, "The Spa" was a strange and dark story with a deus ex machina ending which I didn't particularly like, but I have another, "The Southern Seas", which looks promising.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme