The Crimson Twins by
Francisco Garcie Pavon
pbk out October 99
(Allison Busby)
at £9.99
Game for something a little bit different? This book from 1969, one of a series featuring Municipal Police Chief Plinio and his sidekick, vet and winemaker Don Lotario, won for Pavon the Premio Nadal, one of Spain’s most prestigious literary prizes. Novelist, essayist and short-story writer, and only latterly a writer of crime fiction, Pavon was first short-listed for this prize in 1945, at the age of 26, for his non-crime novel Cerca de Oviedo (Near Oviedo). It’s hardly surprising then thatsomething other than a conventional detective story is on offer.
Not to say that the traditional aspects of the form are neglected. It’s an intriguing case. Summoned from Tomelloso (Pavon’s birthplace incidentally) to Madrid, Plinio is asked to investigate the disappearance of two elderly spinsters, once inhabitants of Tomelloso
themselves. They leave behind a musty apartment unchanged for years, its walls crammed with fading photographs, a collection of dolls and a roomful of tailor’s dummies, one dressed in the uniform of a Republican soldier.
It’s a gentle ambling novel, often told with humour (look out for the story of the portable bidet) sometimes with melancholy and with as much space for philosophy as sleuthing. As Plinio and Don Lotario pursue their leisurely investigation, there is ample opportunity for them to reflect on the contrasts in country and city life (‘Villages are open books. Cities are newspapers full of lies.’), on life itself (an especially moving moment has Plinio observing a pair of blind lovers)
and to entertain un-PC thoughts of women.
It is also a novel which memorably catches Franco’s Spain (his dictatorship still has six years to run) at a point where it is finally unable to resist the modern world. The case is solved but in a fashion that poignantly highlights the human waste of the Franco years. Whilst less overtly political than Manuel Vazquez Montalban (though Pavon is pretty hard on liberals), Montalban’s readers should also enjoy this one. A highly civilised pleasure.
NB My thanks to Sr.Fernando Martínez Lanez, president of the Spanish
Crime Writers Association, for his help with details of Pavon’s career.
