ANYONE looking at yesterday's entry in my diary will have seen the words 'Overnight Kidnapper' scratched on to the page with black ink.
To emphasise that this was Something Important, I had written them in BLOCK CAPITALS and circled them using a red pen. And because I truly can be a bear of little brain, I had daubed the lot with a fluorescent yellow highlighter.
This sort of advanced level diarying is normally reserved for I-must-not-forget-but-there's-every-chance-I-might events like my wife's birthday and our wedding anniversary.
Part of me wishes that I could claim it was a note to remind me to look up 'K' in the Yellow Pages and hire a 'kidnapper, overnight' to extract the new occupant of 10 Downing Street to an undisclosed location from where he might inflict less buffoonery.
The words, however, were written months before Boris Johnson's irresistible, if improbable, ascent to the office of prime minister.
And on July 17 they acquired a poignancy they lacked when I first marked them in my diary, for that was the day that the great Sicilian author Andrea Camilleri died, aged 93.
Overnight Kidnapper is the 23rd title in his quite wonderful series of Inspector Montalbano detective stories, and the latest to be translated into English, with yesterday the publication date of the paperback.
Ever since the providential day around a decade ago when I fell into the pages of my first Montalbano book, my reading year has followed a hardback-for-Christmas, paperback-for-summer-holiday rhythm.
The first book in the series, The Shape of Water, was published in 1994 on the eve of Camilleri's 70th birthday.
He did not allow age or, later, failing eyesight to hold him back. He penned a total of 28 Montalbano books - an astonishing output, though prolificity never dimmed the brightness, quality, wit and invention of his writing.
One has yet to be published. Called Riccardino, it was written by Camilleri 13 years ago and promptly locked in a safe.
It is the final entry in the Montalbano canon - Camilleri wanted to write his character's definitive last word and spoke of how it should be published after his own death.
I look forward to each new encounter with Montalbano with the same anticipation that you would reserve for a special meal in an expensive restaurant, cracking the spine and turning to the first page with a sigh of contentment in the way one might read a Michelin-starred chef's menu
Having killed off Montalbano, he couldn't imagine resurrecting him in the way Arthur Conan Doyle brought back Sherlock Holmes from his plunge at Reichenbach Falls.
As well as being a valedictory to Montalbano, it will be difficult not to read Riccardino as Camilleri's own epitaph.
By the time the books found me, around 10 had been translated into English. I enjoyed the first so much that I immediately read another, and then another.
By then I realised that food is of central importance to the stories. Montalbano is fanatical about good meals being eaten in silence.
Like Montalbano with his favourite pasta 'ncasciate - "a dish worthy of Olympus" - there was a temptation to gorge on title after title but I resisted, and with a couple of exceptions have eased into my pair-of-books-a-year routine.
I look forward to each new encounter with Montalbano with the same anticipation that you would reserve for a special meal in an expensive restaurant, cracking the spine and turning to the first page with a sigh of contentment in the way one might read a Michelin-starred chef's menu.
And that's why 'Overnight Kidnapper' was circled, underlined and highlighted in my diary.
THANKS to all who have inquired about the Irish News bird machine following my last column; its relentless sonic assault continues.
The 15th adventure in the Montalbano series is called The Dance of the Seagull.
The title comes from a scene in which a gull falls from the sky and lands in front of the inspector, before performing an odd dance and dropping dead. Montalbano regards it as a dark omen that torments him for the rest of the story.
I know the feeling, though at least Montalbano's gull torture lasted only 180 pages.
