Nonfiction
Andrea Camilleri: a Companion to the Mystery Fiction

by Lucia Rinaldi
McFarland, April 2012, $39.95

The McFarland Companion series, edited by Elizabeth Foxwell, has been consistently excellent, both in its choice of subjects and its quality of scholarship and writing. This latest addition is well up to the standard set by earlier volumes on John Buchan, E.X. Ferrars, and Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, and contains the usual features: a biography of the subject, a life chronology, and alphabetical and chronological lists of works, followed by a main text in dictionary form including works, major characters, locales, associates and influences, and topical essays (e.g., “Mafia and Representation of the Church”).

Born in 1925, the prolific Andrea Camilleri, creator of Sicilian cop Salvo Montalbano, is my personal favorite among recent European mystery writers in translation. He is the first non-English-language writer as well as the first living subject to be covered in the McFarland series. Rinaldi lists the Montalbano books and stories and the author’s other writings by their original Italian titles in separate alphabetical and chronological lists, with US titles or translations of titles not published in English given in parentheses.

Jon L. Breen

The McFarland Companion series, edited by Elizabeth Foxwell, has been consistently excellent, both in its choice of subjects and its quality of scholarship and writing. This latest addition is well up to the standard set by earlier volumes on John Buchan, E.X. Ferrars, and Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, and contains the usual features: a biography of the subject, a life chronology, and alphabetical and chronological lists of works, followed by a main text in dictionary form including works, major characters, locales, associates and influences, and topical essays (e.g., “Mafia and Representation of the Church”).

Born in 1925, the prolific Andrea Camilleri, creator of Sicilian cop Salvo Montalbano, is my personal favorite among recent European mystery writers in translation. He is the first non-English-language writer as well as the first living subject to be covered in the McFarland series. Rinaldi lists the Montalbano books and stories and the author’s other writings by their original Italian titles in separate alphabetical and chronological lists, with US titles or translations of titles not published in English given in parentheses.

Teri Duerr
3020

by Lucia Rinaldi
McFarland, April 2012, $39.95

Rinaldi
April 2012
andrea-camilleri-a-companion-to-the-mystery-fiction
39.95
McFarland