Andrea Camilleri, who took a late-career stab at writing a mystery novel and came up with the Inspector Montalbano detective books, which became wildly successful in Italy and were the basis for a popular television series, died on Wednesday morning in a hospital in Rome. He was 93.

A spokeswoman for the hospital, the Santo Spirito, confirmed the death, which came a month after Mr. Camilleri was hospitalized with complications of a broken thigh bone and heart problems.

“I have an extremely disorderly manner of writing,” Mr. Camilleri told The Times in 2002. “I don’t write like Snoopy: ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ I couldn’t start with Chapter 1.”

A mystery, he thought, might force him into more manageable habits. “Everything has to follow a certain logic,” he said. “Everything has to be in a certain place.”