When the Mediterranean hosts a detective story: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri, Jean-Claude Izzo

3 Introduction Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri, Jean-Claude Izzo. I have known, in different moments and ways, the detective stories by these three authors. I discovered the adventures of Pepe Carvalho and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s great expressive abilities at University, during a course of Spanish literature. Andrea Camilleri and his Inspector Montalbano have been for long a family “passion”, while I remember I bought the first book by Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos, fascinated by the title and completely ignoring the kind of narration of the author. I approached these different “thrilling worlds” in different periods, discovering, in all the three various narrative similarities. These common elements made me think to be able to trace back the various works to the same narrative kind. I made some researches, most of all through internet, newspaper articles and literary criticism, and I discovered that in fact the three authors are often considered a part of the same category of detective story, defined “Mediterranean detective story”. The first part of this study will be devoted to the history of detective story, of which it seems important to offer a general overview. I will go through the main steps of the evolution of the genre taken into consideration, from the origins to the noir, stopping on the most representative authors and periods and putting in evidence the influence always exerted by social context on the various kinds of detective fiction. The second, more specific, part will be focused on a comparative analysis of the three authors. I will try to put in evidence the particular situation of detective story in the countries to which the three writers belong, the expressive originality of each of them, their narrative style and the different intentions that drove them to choose this narrative form. I will separately examine the detective stories by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri and Jean-Claude Izzo, paying a particular attention to common elements which are present in the three detective fiction cycles: the character’s psychology, family, the gastronomic element, the philosophy of life. In this study, I will take into consideration the books by the authors, critical texts on the authors and on detective fiction, and material available in the internet, which is essential for the collection of information, most of all about Jean-Claude Izzo, to whom no criticism has been dedicated yet. I will try, then, to put in evidence the reference of the works by Vázquez Montalbán, Camilleri and Izzo to a common narrative kind, as an expression of Mediterranean reality.