Voice of the Violin
by Andrea Camilleri
Translated by Stephen Sartarelli
Viking, 256 pages, hardback, 2003
Every time I came to the end of a session of reading Voice of the Violin, my introduction to the writing of Andrea Camilleri and his character Salvo Montalbano, I found myself grinning all over from sheer pleasure.
Which is odd, because it's a full-blooded detective story whose subject matter is not always especially pleasant. A minor traffic accident draws Sicilian cop Montalbano into discovering the naked, murdered body of a beautiful young woman, Michela Licalzi; immediately before death she has had both vaginal and anal intercourse, but there are no secretions within her body for forensics to work with, and all her clothes and personal belongings have been removed from the scene. Some of those personal belongings were valuable – notably her jewelry, in the handbag she kept with her – but where was the sense in her murderer removing all the rest? Unless, of course, the other items might in some way offer a clue to his identity ...
Montalbano has to work through not only the mystery but also Sicilian police politics, the complexities of Michela Licalzi's romantic and other liaisons, and a pair of linked crises in his own emotional life – these latter two problems exacerbated by the immediate attraction between himself and the dead woman's best friend, Anna Tropeano.
This might sound as if it all makes for Voice of the Violin being a weighty, somewhat worthy, somewhat gruelling novel, a reader preconception that is perhaps not helped by public comparisons between Camilleri's Montalbano and Georges Simenon's Maigret. Such comparisons are actually well justified – if you like Maigret (or Mark Hebden's Pel series, or Janwillem van de Wetering's Amsterdam Cops series, or Sjowall & Wahloo) you'll love this – but they obscure the astonishing lightness of touch that Camilleri achieves. He's a master of creating character or conjuring up a scene with just a few deft brush-strokes, while Montalbano's rather quirky morality and passion for good food, both very lightly and often humorously depicted, manage to become almost additional characters in their own right.
This is really quite a short novel – the publisher has released it in a small format to bump up the page-count a bit – but it's an immensely satisfying one. It's also a very complete one. It's customary to say of good novels that one was disappointed to come to the last page, but in the case of Voice of the Violin the telling is so well crafted that in fact this wasn't – at least for this reviewer – true: as with one of those meals Montalbano so much enjoys, the last mouthful perfectly satiates, and even a morsel more would be a surfeit.
—Crescent Blues