Il giudice Surra e altre indagini in Sicilia
by Andrea Camilleri
Andrea Camilleri is, of course, best known for his stories and novels set in Sicily featuring the irascible police commissioner Salvo Montalbano. But this represents only part of his prolific output. Alongside the Montalbano series, Camilleri also wrote other crime fiction, as well as historical novels often inspired by obscure real-life events drawn from Sicilian history.
Il giudice Surra e altre indagini in Sicilia (“Judge Surra and Other Investigations in Sicily”)
brings together three crime stories by the late author, originally published
separately over the years. Taken individually, the stories are engaging without
being especially remarkable; read together, however, they form a well-balanced
collection, each illuminating the others in unexpected ways.
Troppi equivoci (“Too Many Misunderstandings”) is a dark, hard-boiled and, at times, rather brutal tale in which a budding romance is abruptly cut short by the “misunderstandings” of the title. Featuring bungling criminals, sadistic violence and, ultimately, revenge, it was originally written as Camilleri’s Sicilian contribution to a crime anthology set across different regions of Italy.
Il Giudice Surra (“Judge Surra”) shows Camilleri working in historical mode. Sent from Turin to Sicily in the years following Italian unification, Surra proves unexpectedly resistant to the influence of the nascent mafia – perhaps precisely because he, consciously or unconsciously, refuses to acknowledge its presence, pushing ahead with the reforms he has been tasked to implement. The sights, sounds (and even tastes) of 19th-century Sicily are vividly evoked, while the story’s lightly comic surface conceals a an almost philosophical undercurrent.
The collection concludes with the poignant Il Medaglione, in which a small-town police chief (not unlike the more famous Montalbano) not only brings a fugitive to justice, but also brings a measure of peace to a lonely widower obsessed with a photograph of another man found in a locket belonging to his late wife.
Taken as a whole, this is a finely judged collection and an excellent introduction to Camilleri beyond Montalbano.
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