Andrea Camilleri, who has died aged 93, was one of the latest starters and latest finishers in crime fiction.

He was almost 70 – after a rich career as a theatre director, TV producer, playwright and novelist in other genres – when, finding himself stuck on a historical story, he distracted himself by quickly writing a detective story. In a sort of literary European Union, he was influenced by three literary heroes: the Belgian Georges Simenon, creator of Inspector Maigret; Leonardo Sciascia, author of The Day of the Owl, who was a native of Sicily like Camilleri; and the Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

First met by Italian readers in La forma dell’acqua in 1994 (in English as The Shape of Water in 2002), Camilleri’s cop, Commissario Salvo Montalbano shared many traits with his creator: a Sicilian with a love of literature, cigarettes and food. As in Montalbán’s Inspector Pepe Carvalho books, Montalbano – named in homage to the Spanish novelist – uses delicious cuisine as a counterweight to his deathly profession. Eating, Camilleri liked to say, is one of the greatest pleasures the dead surrender.

After his delayed start in the mystery form, Camilleri wrote fast. Their sales accelerated by an atmospheric TV series (seen on BBC4 in the UK and SBS in Australia), 27 Montalbano novels have been published in Italy to date. The 24th will make it to English this September, when The Other End of the Line will be published.

That book starts with Montalbano dealing with a huge group of political refugees arriving on the Sicilian coast – a characteristic topicality in a series of novels that have followed Italy into the eras of the euro, the contentious governments of Silvio Berlusconi (to whom Camilleri was strongly opposed), and Euroscepticism.

Andrea Camilleri: a life in writing Read more

“In many crime novels, the events seem completely detached from the economic, political and social context in which they occur. In my books, I deliberately decided to smuggle into a detective novel a critical commentary on my times,” he told me when I interviewed him in Rome – still furiously chain-smoking at the age of 88 – in 2012.

A strong undercurrent in the Montalbano books is the pressure on the Italian state from three outside sources: the Roman Catholic church, the US and the mafia. Having grown up in Sicily, the motherland of Italian organised crime, Camilleri used his fiction to mock and expose the mob, as Sciascia had. The bravura opening of Camilleri’s The Potters Field gives Montalbano a nightmare in which the mafia has become the government of the country openly, rather than, as the reader is invited to think, covertly.

“An amazing thing happens in Italy,” Camilleri told me. “That we have MPs and senators involved with the mafia. They continue to be called honourable when they are not at all. It’s not far from that to taking over power.”

He considered it his duty to speak out against the dark politics by which his country was often seduced, regularly appearing as a pundit on Italian TV shows where he was torrentially opinionated, intelligent and witty. Camilleri became so recognisable that, unusually for a novelist, he was impersonated by satirists and comedians.

Complimented for “courage” in calling out the gangsters, Camilleri pointed out that he was the beneficiary of the contradiction that mafiosi hated criticism from judges and journalists – many of whom they executed – but were flattered by being fictionalised; for example, obsessively quoting The Godfather.

The pleasure of his own crime fiction was often informed by his long career before arriving at the genre. Producing a long-running Italian TV adaptation of Simenon’s Maigret novels gave him an intensive course in plotting. Decades of directing the game-playing stage plays of Luigi Pirandello, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author, showed in Camilleri’s fondness for structural tricks. The two writers shared a Sicilian birthplace, Porto Empedocle, where statues of Pirandello and Camilleri now face each other in the town.

There will be at least one more novel. In our interview, he told me that – as Agatha Christie did with Hercule Poirot in Curtain – he had deposited with his publisher Riccardino, a final novel in which Montalbano is “finished off” that was to only be published posthumously. It should be a fitting epitaph to one of the latest, but greatest, careers in crime writing.