Manuel Vazquez Montalban Off Side
Serpent's Tail Pbk (1 85242 208 4) Trans. Ed Emery £8.99
Times of great social
dislocation and uncertainty tend to leave rich pickings for mystery writers -
Twenties/Thirties USA with its mass unemployment and organised crime threw up the cynical,
pessimistic popular fiction of the pulps. Golden Age England reacted to the decay of its
caste system by producing a fiction that constantly reasserts that system through books
that never fail to stress the status quo - through the drawing room solution and return to
the "natural order". The mass paranoia of the Cold War not only gave us some
great Spy fiction but also much of the most influential modern Sci-Fi. And so to Spain in the mid 80's and early nineties. With the death of Franco a society embracing change at high speed. Democracy, liberty, Pedro Almodavar, and grouping in the streets - a country full of new found optimism and youth, a country of high hopes facing predestined disappointment. With greater freedom and the lure of the new comes the inevitable large scale corruption and casual disregard for the past. Enter Manuel Vasquez Montalban, a man uniquely placed (being the Communist son of Communist father and Anarchist mother) to cast the suitably disdainful eye of the outsider on New Spain through his creation Pepe Carvalho.
REVIEW
Murder in the Central Committee
Serpent's Tail Pbk (1 85242 131 2) Trans.Patrick Camiller £7.99
With the re-issue of
Montalban's first Carvalho title Murder in the Central Committee together
with the first UK publication of Off Side anyone who hasn't already done so
has a fine chance to get aquainted with Carvalho. Native of Barcelona, private
investigator, lover of food and burner of books Pepe walks the mean streets of his home
town exposing hypocrisy and corruption everywhere and anywhere. The new breed of Spanish
businessman being just as worthy a target as any rheumy eyed, nostalgia addled fascist.
Pepe's attitude is that even if things aren't as bad as they were they're still not a lot
better. And someone has to point this out. Murder in the Central Committee
sees Montalban on familiar territory with the murder, at a party meeting of the General
Secretary of the Communist party. The lights go out and the knife goes in. A locked room
and plenty of suspects with a motive - just, as Pepe observes, "like an English
murder mystery" only here the similarity ends. The book follows convoluted trail
taking in CIA involvement, betrayed ideals and high level dissembling, still having time
for Carvalho to rail against the inadequacies of an enforced stay in Madrid before the
typically ambiguous denouement. Off Side finds Carvalho back in Barcelona and investigating a spate of threatening letters aimed at the Football club's new star signing Jack Mortimer. Featuring a cast of Arab gangsters, footballers, junkies and men with power and no scruples the plot leaves plenty of scope for rumination on the future of Barcelona and in particular the fate of the people of the barrio Montalban feels such a kinship with. The tone, between the barbed scenes where Pepe gets to deflate someone's ego, is mainly one of resignation at the loss of past values. But as in the other book the strength of Pepe's appetite for life and the sensual pleasures keeps the book from becoming maudlin.
I'd hate to recommend one of these titles above the other. I'd say they are both essential reading - tightly plotted, very funny, not a one-dimensional character in sight. What more can you ask? (RL)
