Erudite cop. Literary contexts in Andrea Camilleri’s ‘Montalbano’ series
This article sets off to discuss the intertextuality of some of Andrea Camilleri’s detective novels which offer a variety of implicit and explicit signals of the bonds between them and the prior texts, and also display the cultural competence of the protagonists — and, thus, of the author an imposing assembly of thirty names — from Homer to R. Musil to G. Simenon. On the primary semantic level the linguistic level, the distinctive elements are realised as citations e.g. songs, poems, proverbs and direct and indirect references to the names of literary and filmic characters, names of authors and their works’ titles. The fictional world, i.e. the secondary semantic level, abounds, too, in distinctive elements such as similar situations, events, structures, characters and the descriptions of their looks. The numerous references to the literary tradition document the writer’s striving to ennoble detective fiction and protect it from the negative impact of the homogeneity of modern culture.