Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  Since I had lived only in Angola and Cuba, I had read only whatever was published there. Not even books printed in Spain or Mexico were imported, unless you counted the horrible USSR-edited journal Progress, which should have been called Regression. It was thanks to this one library that I had the chance to encounter authors like Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Mailer’s work after The Naked and the Dead, the latest Vargas Llosa, and many others whose work I devoured. Among them was a Spanish thriller writer called Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

  When I learned of the existence of a Spanish detective novelist, I felt curiosity and suspicion. A Spanish crime writer? My experience of crime fiction—first as a reader, then as a relentless and scathing critic—was rooted, like that of all ordinary Cubans, in the tradition of the classic Anglo-Saxon and French works, moving to the almost always disappointing examples of the “revolutionary Cuban detective novel” (which generally lacked the “novel” part), and stories of espionage from the Soviet Union (Yulian Semyonov, Vladimir Bogomolov). More recently the odd book had slipped through, such as works by the Italian Leonardo Sciascia; the Argentine classic Operation Massacre by Rodolfo Walsh (a nonfiction novel in the mold of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, also published in Cuba); Mario Puzo’s The Godfather; and a few more.

  Driven by an interest more anthropological than literary, I borrowed the library’s only title by this so-called Spanish crime writer. Its title was The Spa, and it had been published in 1986 by the Spanish publisher Planeta. And here followed the traumatic encounter.

  The Spa is the eighth of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s novels to feature the detective Pepe Carvalho, a former Communist Party member, ex–CIA agent, Catalan, and son of Galicia. The novel’s plot takes place in the resort of Marbella in southern Spain, where Carvalho comes in pursuit of a detox recommended to him long ago by a certain Isidro Planas, Catalan businessman. During a two-week stay at a medical facility run by German specialists, Carvalho (then unfamiliar to me) is subjected to a strict diet and an endless series of enemas to punish and purify his body, which apparently is given to all imaginable excesses of gastronomy and alcohol. At this resort, so far from Barcelona, where he lives and works as a detective, Carvalho is drawn into an investigation that connects the present with the era of the German Third Reich, and some unregenerate Fascists. And he unravels a mystery.

  I cannot say that the reading experience was disappointing. It was a well-written novel, told with assurance, with well-plotted adventures and a command of language above that of the best detective novels. But nothing more. In this novel, Pepe Carvalho does not eat, or drink white wine. He does not fight with his prostitute girlfriend, he does not talk to his friends in Barcelona or run around town, he does not move among the levels of a society marked by its Franco-led past and its recent transition into democracy. He cannot even burn one or more books from his private library in the process of lighting his home fireplace.

  The mandatory selection of this particular novel (which was not really a choice, since there was nothing else by that author) gave me an impression of that character and its creator that was totally incomprehensible and, moreover, wrong—or rather, distorted, given my status as a newcomer to this writer’s world. Without further ado, I consigned the novelist and his Spanish detective to oblivion, deeming him more than competent as a writer but nothing extraordinary, in my uninformed opinion.

  Fortunately, a little over a year later I made my first trip to Spain, invited to participate (as a journalist) in what would be the first Semana Negra in Gijón, Asturias. It was in the days before the meeting, while we were in Madrid, that the Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo stopped at a street bookstall and bought me (for a hundred pesetas) the novel I recommend with every possible accolade: Southern Seas, written, of course, by that very Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, considered (as I discovered) the great guru, the master, the jewel of the Spanish crime novel, and—as a bonus—one of the most abrasive and active intellectuals of his time.

  During the days of the Semana Negra, always in my role as journalist, I very quickly had the audacity and good fortune to interview Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who was attending this wonderful meeting for a couple of days. Of course the conversation could not be about his work; it was essentially dedicated to educating me, and through me the ignorant Cuban readers, about the origin and characteristics of the detective novel in that country. On top of that juicy first-hand assessment, I came away from the conversation with something important: the certainty that this Spanish detective novelist was a man of remarkable intellectual powers, and a legendary temper.

  It was upon my return to Cuba, in the summer of 1988, that I read Southern Seas, a novel that nine years earlier had won the prestigious Premio Planeta (Planet Prize). The shock that I got while reading Vázquez Montalbán’s novel—which I should have read before The Spa, to arm myself with the keys to open this literary world and explore it—was so profound that I emerged from it with shortness of breath, a dry mouth, and an alarming conviction: if I were ever to write a detective novel, I would write it the way this Spaniard had written Southern Seas, and if I wrote this novel and created an investigator, mine would have to be as vital as Carvalho, skeptical and cynical, who walked freely through the pages of Southern Seas, retracing the streets of Barcelona and the routes of his own time in history and humanity.

  Encountering this novel was a radical cure for my initial trauma, and also the beginning of a chronic dependency on the works of Vázquez Montalbán, whose novels, detective and otherwise, commanded me to buy them during my trips to Spain, at a time that did not afford me that luxury. It was also the beginning of a quest for even physical closeness with the author, a contact that would become a peculiar friendship—because with Manolo, as I later called him, everything was peculiar: even the manner of his death in 2003, in a place as inappropriate as the Bangkok airport, a city he’d used as the setting for one of his novels. Thus, over a period of years, we met several times in Barcelona and Havana, to the point that I asked him to make the presentation of my first novel published in Spain (Máscaras, 1997; Red Havana in English)—and he asked me to serve as tour guide to the most complicated routes for the purpose of understanding Havana during his research of the Cuban world before Pope John Paul II’s visit to the island, for what would become the long essay And God Entered Havana (1998).

  Having said all this, however, it is time to begin to explain . . . It may already be obvious that, in my opinion, Southern Seas is, like everything else here, an excellent novel with a well-plotted and satisfying mystery, as one expects of the best of the genre. But it should also be clear that Southern Seas is, above all, an excellent novel, and its being a detective novel serves only to double its significance and influence.

  Until the arrival of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and his novel Tattoo (1974, the second book to feature Pepe Carvalho), the Spanish detective novel had barely managed to get an identity card. Several writers in the 1920s and later, in the period after 1950 (following the Civil War and the even harder postwar years), had written works in the genre with some success, but without much ability to create a Spanish school of crime fiction or, at a minimum, a unique path that others could find and trace. The arrival of this new novelist, however, fulfilled both these requirements: a national identity for a genre that began to be written in Spanish and an aesthetic route that would quickly place him in the company of other notable authors, such as Andreu Martín, Juan Madrid, and Francisco González Ledesma, among others.

  But if the literary qualities of this writer revealed themselves in Tattoo and The Angst-Ridden Executive (1977), they reached their highest aesthetic and conceptual level in Southern Seas. The novel’s plot, which begins with the discovery that a wealthy Catalan businessman has died in a place where he’d been hiding for a year, lets Vázquez Montalbán make a grim dissection of Spanish society in the years immediately after the death of dictator Francisco Franco and the establishment of a new democracy, hesitant, threatene
d, and surprising even to itself.

  The gallery of characters through whom Carvalho gets different views of the missing and murdered businessman, Stuart Pedrell, allows the writer to give us the many faces of a vibrant society, a snapshot of a historical moment still in process, with its ideological debates, its opportunism, its political and economic frustrations, its democratic present, and its Franco-era past. The city, meanwhile, shifts from the lowest-class neighborhoods to the brightest bourgeois salons, always passing through Barcelona’s historic and charming Las Ramblas, the port, and Chinatown. It becomes much more than a suitable setting; it serves as the map of a universe changed by new possibilities and marked by the heavy shackles of past dictatorial capitalism. Meanwhile, Carvalho, a hopelessly disenchanted ideologue, uses his personality, his phobias and passions, to open doorways to understanding political frustration and enjoying a feast of the senses through gastronomic and alcoholic delights.

  In all these ways and many others—including vibrant language—Southern Seas meets the aesthetic standards of a crime novel, but it is intended above all to be a bitter novel of society, with the ability to raise questions and even give some answers. How could it fail to do so, given its author’s ideological clarity?

  It was no accident that as soon as I finished my immersion in Southern Seas, I proceeded in short order to devour Tattoo, The Angst-Ridden Executive, Murder in the Central Committee (1981), The Birds of Bangkok (1983), and Alexandria’s Rose (1984), and needed to revisit The Spa. Nor was it luck that a few months after this thrilling discovery of the possibilities of the detective story, brought to me by the work of this author, when I finally had time to start my own novel after six years of hard work with a daily newspaper, one of the compass points that guided me in this adventure was the revelation I’d seen in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and his irreverent detective, Pepe Carvalho. The other path, of course, bore the stamp of Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe. In both cases, the detective novel offered the possibilities I desired: it worked as a highly literary endeavor that could reveal environments, personalities, social traumas, and conflicts among individuals and generations through the simple, intelligent creation of a suspenseful mystery.

  As you may have noticed, dear reader, Southern Seas, for all this, is far more than a novel. It is, in Spanish, the equivalent of Hammett’s The Glass Key in English. Except that, instead of the famous Chinese porcelain vase that, according to Chandler, the teacher threw in the street, what the master Manuel Vázquez Montalbán has given us is a compass that points us to Literature (with a capital “L”), which we other writers have tried to use as a guide, for better or worse, as we attempt the difficult task of killing with words: the art of writing the detective novel—in Spanish.

  I hope that Manolo, as dissatisfied and lucid as ever, would agree with me, wherever he is—whether in the skies of Bangkok or, as he no doubt would have preferred, in Barcelona’s Chinatown, a materialistic heaven, where he might live within reach of the voluptuous odors of his favorite restaurant, Casa Leopoldo.

  Cuban author Leonardo Padura Fuentes (b. 1955) is best known for his quartet of Havana-set novels Las cuatro estaciones (The Four Seasons), which feature Inspector Mario Conde and are also referred to as the Havana Quartet. The first in the series, Pasado perfecto (aka Havana Blue), was published in 1991; the final novel, Paisaje de otoño (Havana Black) won the 1998 Premio Hammett, awarded by the Asociación Internacional de Escritores Policíacos. Padura is the author of nine novels in total. The most recent, El hombre que amaba a los perros (The Man Who Loved Dogs), was published in 2009.

  Prótesis (Prosthesis)

  by Andreu Martín (1980)

  CRISTINA FALLARÁS

  (essay translated from the Spanish by Ellen Clair Lamb)

  * * *

  Born in Barcelona, Andreu Martín (b. 1949) is the author of more than fifteen crime novels. He made his debut in 1979, publishing three novels that year, and Prótesis followed in 1980. Martín has also written children’s books and comics, and for film, theater, and TV. He has won a number of European literary prizes, including the Premio Çírculo del Crimen, the Deutsche Krimi Preis, and the Alfa 7.

  * * *

  There is nothing more sinister than the smile of a skull. It is a petrified rictus, cold, expressionless and unchanging. Teeth clenched in a fierce bite. It is a trap that has slammed shut, clapping on its prey and never letting go. It is a laugh that contains no joy, a forced smile, a smile of pain, menace and cruelty. The grin is of an executioner who pretends to be your friend before causing you damage, great damage. Nothing funny is happening now, there’s nothing to laugh about, but soon—yes, very soon—just the thought of it . . .

  —opening lines of Prótesis

  With your permission, as I focus on this term “noir,” I turn to Wikipedia, not only for a hook but because it has become one of our new minor deities: “The term is associated with a type of detective story in which the resolution of the mystery is not the principal goal, and the conflicts are usually quite violent; the line between good and evil people is blurred, and most of the major characters have lost or failed in their search for truth, or at least a glimpse of it.” To that I need to add the stamp of my own dark universe, the essential parts of a genre I’d kill for (don’t judge me): a good noir is the insect in the baby’s cradle, the rat on a naked woman’s sheets, the unlit match that separates claw from meat.

  A good noir is one that hurts when you read it.

  A good noir describes the space that you, upstanding citizen, share with the psychopath.

  A good noir forces you to confront the rotten things within yourself, the things you’ve buried or learned not to give in to.

  A good noir cannot be read without some loss of innocence.

  That’s Prótesis, the masterwork of Andreu Martín: a novel that hurts you, that describes the beast inside you, that destroys your innocence. In Prótesis nothing is good—because who or what is truly bad?—and there’s nothing to be gained; everyone is born to lose, and is lost. Prótesis exposes you completely and nails you with an iron fist of destruction. It is a dissection of amorality and wit in which two characters, policeman and criminal, cling to each other in a macabre dance that leads to death.

  Prótesis is also the hardest, most violent novel ever published in Spain, comparable perhaps only to a classic like The Family of Pascual Duarte (1942) by Nobel Prize–winner Camilo José Cela. I remember the first time I read it. The awe. In my hands, I held a painful artifact from the grave wherein pulsed Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. And it was a Spanish novel, published in 1980.

  • • •

  1980: In Barcelona, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (b. 1939) had already published the first adventures of his detective, Carvalho: I Killed Kennedy (1972), Tattoo (1974), and The Angst-Ridden Executive (1977). Juan Marsé (b. 1933) had unwittingly joined the ranks of the classics with If They Tell You I Fell (1973). And Eduardo Mendoza (b. 1943) had forged his own path in ’75 with The Truth About the Savolta Case. In less than a decade, these three had created a basis, but Andreu Martín (b. 1949), youngest of them all, would raise the stakes with a work more powerful, more free, more amazing (and perhaps for these reasons, less popular) than any of these: Prótesis. The first three painted a city of gray losers, harborside transvestites and women still mending their flesh-colored stockings. This was Barcelona dyed black by a Franco regime that did not allow good police officers or conceive of judges without corruption. The winners were still those who ruled, and the losers were everyone.

  “I am a writer because Manuel Vázquez Montalbán wrote Tattoo,” our author has said (El País, February 3, 2011). Maybe so, but Andreu Martín exploded the boundaries between detective and criminal, winners and losers, innocent and depraved, in order to show us evil: the desire for others’ pain and the amorality that comes from forty years of silence, the smell of basements and hunger.

  • • •

  The tim
e: late ’70s. In Spain, Franco had just died, the Catholic-Fascist dictator who had been repressing the country for forty years after winning the Civil War. In the broadest terms, a large population of middle-class poor, domesticated and submissive, lived surrounded by: a) a few cells of left-wing radicals; b) a core group of Fascists who had been enriched by the regime; c) a sprinkling of proletarian suburbs, humbled by decades of the military and its reforms; and d) the suburban children of the poorest layers of society, relics of internal emigration, the products of rootlessness and violence. A terrible rage grew in the shadows of these neighborhoods, constructed so badly by industrial development on the outskirts of cities like Barcelona, Madrid, and Bilbao.

  Spain is an anomaly in Western Europe. In the suburbs of Barcelona they’ve built neighborhoods of cheap block where, after their workdays in the factories, immigrants from the poorer regions of Spain share living space with traditionally excluded groups, particularly the Roma.

  In this broth bubbles a group of kids who have not yet come of age: El Migue, El Chava, El Marujo, and at the head of the group, El Cachas, followed by a young girl, la Nena, who doesn’t wear panties and has known since she stopped sucking her thumb that she’d be a whore (and who cares?).

  This is what happens: one night, they grab a couple driving a Renault 12 and take them up Tibidabo, the mountain crowned by Christ, who contemplates the city with open arms from the far side of the harbor. The idea is to rape the woman, beat the man, compete to be the worst, unleash the animal within, steal whatever they can, slake the need for violence that’s killing them, and run. But something goes wrong—very wrong—when El Gallego, a bloodthirsty policeman, shows up.