José Saramago dedicates his latest novel, Seeing, to two people: “For Pilar, every single day” and “For Manuel Vázquez Montalban, who lives on”. Montalban died in 2003 in Bangkok, while in transit to his beloved Barcelona from a speaking tour in Australia. But he does live on through his peerless Pepe Carvalho, private investigator and connoisseur of Catalonian cuisine.
It might seem unusual for a Nobel literature laureate to hold a creator of detective fiction in such high regard, but Montalban and Carvalho are no ordinary writer-and-detective duo. They are the bards of social, political and cultural change in Barcelona, chronicling, among others, the effects of corporatism (The Angst-Ridden Executive), leftwing factionalism (Murder in the Central Committee) and the unsavoury effects of Olympic Games on host cities (Off Side).
As realists resigned to endemic corruption in government and business, Montalban and Carvalho have much to teach crime fiction writers who favour events of the day as the basis for their work — and for a conscientising crusade of sorts. Much recent South African writing in the genre has dealt with newsy topics such as perlemoen poaching and asbestos mining, but in a way that is blunt rather than nuanced, preachy rather than persuasive.
Montalban is not alone in subtlety of approach. There is Donna Leon, a professor of English in Venice, who has given us the estimable Commissario Brunetti, a Venetian policeman whose philosophical acceptance of the circumscribed limits of Italian justice wrings pathos every time. Michael Dibdin has created the unforgettable Aurelio Zen, Venetian born but fated to traipse around Italy apprehending criminals he knows will escape sanction thanks to legal technicalities.
Completing the current trinity of Italian police procedurals is Andrea Camilleri. He writes in Italian, with lashings of Sicilian dialect, and is translated wonderfully saltily into English by Stephen Sartarelli. For years, Camilleri has played complimentary intertextual games with Montalban. First, Camilleri’s protagonist is named Salvo Montalbano. Second, Montalbano has a habit of reading the detective fiction of Manuel Vázquez Montalban. Last, Camilleri is aware of literary snobbishness about the detective novel and policier.
Excursion to Tindari, the latest Camilleri, deals wryly with the place, or absence, of crime fiction in the literary sphere. Montalbano is in conversation with his trusted deputy Mimi Augello:
[Augello] “When you retire you could start writing novels.”
[Montalbano] “I would definitely write mysteries. But it’s not worth the trouble.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because certain critics and professors, or would-be critics and professors, consider mystery novels a minor genre. And, in fact, in histories of literature they’re never even mentioned.”
“What the hell do you care? Do you want to enter literary history alongside Dante and Manzoni?”
“I’d die of shame.”
“So just write them and be content with that.”
Someone who did just write them and was very content with that was the late Mickey Spillane, who died last month of cancer, aged 88. The creator of Mike Hammer, Spillane was the 20th century’s bestselling novelist: estimates put his global sales at about 200-million books. Already by 1980, a survey indicated that seven of the top 15 all-time bestselling fiction titles in the United States were by Spillane.
Spillane had no literary pretensions, declaring that “if the public likes you, you’re good”. Reacting to criticism from Raymond Chandler that his work was “nothing but a mixture of violence and outright pornography”, Spillane shot back: “Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.”
Nonetheless, the union of literary and crime fiction would appear to be a consummation devoutly to be wished, at least by English publishers. Since her debut novels, The Cutting Room and Tamburlaine Must Die, the Scottish writer Louise Welsh has been punted as most likely to dissolve that divide.
The Bullet Trick, her latest novel, didn’t quite do that for Mark Lawson: “But while Welsh may yet be the writer to combine literary acceptance with detective writing, The Bullet Trick doesn’t feel like the book to do it … the story is not quite gripping enough for plot queens, the writing a little short of what prose snobs desire. The trick is missed.” (The Guardian, July 22.)
Next up is John Banville writing as Benjamin Black, with a novel called Christine Falls, which features a hero by the name of Quirke, a Dublin pathologist. It’s due here in October, so I won’t anticipate its arrival too much by telling you what I think of the proof copy I’m reading right now.
One thing is for sure, though: if deathless prose comes in detective fiction, it’s from the pen of the late great Montalban.