The writer of the sicilian Andrea Camilleri, the “father” of the commissioner Montalbano, passed away Wednesday at the age of 93 years, announced the hospital roman, where he was in a critical state since a cardiac arrest in June. “His condition remains critical of the last few days has worsened in the last hours, compromising vital functions”, announced the hospital in a press release, stating that the funeral would take place in the privacy.

Italy has, however, to pay a last tribute to the “pope” of the polar whose style is rich and jubilant had pulled the black novel to the literature. Of sicilian origin, born in Porto Empedocle in 1925, Andrea Camilleri published his first novel at the age of 53 years. It will be a success in Italy and internationally with his detective novels featuring Salvo Montalbano, cop good-natured and lover of good food, small-town sicilian fictional Vigata. The success has been dramatic for her character, whose first adventure, The shape of water , was published in 1994, when its author was already 69 years old.

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“I love him and I hate him at the same time. I owe him almost everything, it opened the way for the other novels, î he told about his hero, the charm of rough. “But it is invasive, presumptuous, unpleasant, and when I fall on a bone, I see it happen I said I’d do it like this'”, told the novelist the skull receding hairline and the nose floor of the eternal square glasses, always surrounded by ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts.

The adventures of the commissioner’s top-color is available on over thirty novels and a television series, which delighted the Italians for twenty years. Author of a hundred books, Andra Camilleri has sold more than twenty million books in Italy. The series of crime novels featuring commissioner has been translated into thirty languages.

An “immense debt” to Simenon

“I’m not afraid to die, I only regret having to leave the people I love the most,” wrote Andrea Camilleri. If he acknowledged having “a huge debt to the commissioner Maigret of Simenon”, he had chosen the name of Montalbano in homage to the novelist in catalan Manuel Vazquez Montalban, the creator of Pepe Carvalho.

After a long pause, he published in 1992, hunting season , a novel based on a variety of authentic, situated at the end of the Nineteenth century in the town of Vigata. The book is written in a mixture of Italian and dialect in sicily, which will become the trademark of Camilleri and… a challenge to his translators. “Let’s say that I make up 1% of the words but for the rest, I use the dialect of the peasants or workers sicilians,” he confided to AFP during an interview at his home, roman.

In 2016, then he has lost the sight, Andrea Camilleri crossed the milestone of 100 books with a new investigation of Montalbano that he said that he dictated to his assistant. The last, Il cuoco dell Alcyon (The cook of the Alcyone), is released in the spring of 2019 and is passed immediately to the head of sales, like the previous ones.