Book Review: The Snack Thief by Andrea Camilleri
This mystery is part of a series set in Sicily, which has been made into TV shows in Italy that I have been watching on an obscure cable station in my area. It finally occurred to me to go and try to read one of the books that the series was based on. And when I saw that my bookstore had the one called “The Snack Thief,” of course the choice was easy.
The series features as its main character Inspector Montalbano. Montalbano is both an individual and a classic character in many ways: loveably difficult to his devoted staff, strictly moral but willing to tell a lie in a good cause – even if sometimes that cause is less about solving a case and more about standing up his long-distance girlfriend on New Year’s Eve because his cook is making rice dumplings (arancini di riso).
Montalbano has an intense appreciation of good food. He’s not much of a snacker, but given the meals that are described in the books, it’s easy to see why – he can’t possibly have any room left for anything between-meals:
He gobbled up a saute of clams in breadcrumbs, a heaping dish of spaghetti with white clam sauce, a roast turbot with oregano and caramelized lemon, and he topped it all off with a bitter chocolate timbale in orange sauce. When it was all over he stood up, went into the kitchen, and shook the chef’s hand without saying a word, deeply moved.
But snacks come into play in this volume of the series when the inspector is called in because a child, apparently a street urchin, is bullying children on their way to school and stealing their snacks. (The helpful notes in the back of the book explain that Italian schoolchildren eat lunch quite late, so their mothers send them to school with a late morning snack.)
Montalbano’s superiors make a fuss that he is spending valuable time on such a trivial matter. But his attention to the incident is justified when it turns out to be directly related to the main plot of the book: The snack thief is the son of a woman who has disappeared and who turns out to be involved in a complicated ring of criminals and terrorists.
The details of the plot, even after seeing the same book as an episode of the TV show, are a bit overcomplicated and hard to follow for my taste, involving all sorts of machinations with the police bureaucracy, the secret service, the terrorists, etc. I tend to prefer a good old straightforward crime of passion, myself.
But I love the characters and the setting, and you can’t help looking forward to the next time Montalbano has something to eat, just for the sake of his reactions:
The pasta with crab was as graceful as a first-rate ballerina, but the stuffed bass in saffron sauce left him breathless, almost frightened.
And while there are other mystery series where snacks are the foods that are more central to the definition of the characters – I defy anyone to get through more than a couple of chapters of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series without needing to go out and get a doughnut, after reading about her eating so many – this is the only one I’ve come across where they play a significant role in the plot. I nominate this one for the Official Mystery of Snackerrific.com.
Buy The Snack Thief Online:
- at Amazon.com
3 Comments
Linda on November 15th, 2008
I wonder if you could write a whole post about detectives and their food
choices. Kinsey Milhone and her awful fast food, James Lee Burke’s
Dave Robicheaux and his Louisiana ham and onion sandwiches… hmmm….
Snackerrific :: » Snack Review: Wye River Crabbers Crackers on November 25th, 2008
[...] that results from being raised in this culinary tradition is excellently clear in a scene from the book about the Sicilian detective that I recently reviewed, in which Detective Montalbano reacts as his colleague grates cheese over his lunch: Even a hyena, [...]
teqjack on November 15th, 2008
I was reminded, with some nostalgia, of the Nero Wolfe series. For example, his buying ham from only one place - a small operation that fed its pigs mainly on peanuts. Snob, epicure, gourmet?