Andrea Camilleri was many things, so many that there was hardly room for all of them in a single person. The story of his “delayed destiny”, as he called it, is well known: fame as a writer came to him at nearly age seventy, with his Inspector Montalbano a runaway hit in book after book. Yet Camilleri was not only his late-life popularity; his success had begun to germinate many decades earlier, and you could say that every fragment of his long life was destined to converge into the figure that Italian readers would love so passionately.

Luca Crovi graduated with a degree in philosophy and a specialization in ancient history from Milan’s Università Cattolica. A rock music critic, radio host, author and journalist expert in noir fiction, over the course of his career he has contributed to several newspapers and magazines. In 2001, he won the Aquicon Prize for his book Delitti di carta nostra, written for Puntozero. In 2002, Marsilio published his monograph Tutti i colori del giallo, which became a radio program of the same name on Radiodue (airing until 2011), itself winning the prestigious Flaiano Award in 2005. Crovi has written noir stories that take on characters who are the brainchilds of the likes of Andrea G. Pinketts, Massimo Carlotto, Joe R. Lansdale, Marcel Allain, and Pierre Souvestre, and he has worked with illustrators such as Maurizio Rosenzweig, Andrea Mutti, and Angelo Busacchini. He has five novels to his credit, published by Rizzoli and SEM: L’ombra del campione (2018), L’ultima canzone del Naviglio (2020), Il Gigante e la Madonnina (2022), Il mistero della torre del parco e altre storie (2022), and La velocità della tartaruga (2024), all featuring Inspector Carlo De Vincenzi. A regular on the Scerbanenco Award jury, Crovi has also become an editor at Sergio Bonelli Editore, where he handles the Almanacchi series and the comic book series for Inspector Ricciardi, the Bastards of Pizzofalcone, and Deadwood Dick.