Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939–2003)

André Malraux called Buenos Aires the capital of an empire that never existed. Manuel Vásquez Montalbán has a character describe the city as ‘the ruin of an imagined world.’ Who knew that Catalan crime fiction could be the medium for a convincing portrayal of Buenos Aires at the end of the 20th c.?

The Argentine cousin of Barcelona private detective Pepe Carvalho has vanished. Webs of intrigue and ambiguous affiliations confound the search. Anyone alive in 1997 on the Río de la Plata show more is a survivor somehow of the Dirty War. Militants turned academics are sipping rich red Mendoza and quibbling over the minutiae of theory. The sons and daughters and friends of military families have become captains of industry or shadow ministers without portfolio. There is a Borges impersonator, and an old folks’ home named for the reactionary poet Leopoldo Lugones. There’s still tango (‘the shortest distance between poetry and life’), or the idea of tango, as kitschy melancholia, and as a symbol of squandered chances. Montalbán’s description of a club of gourmand oligarchs raising a toast ‘to culture!’ just before devouring an extravagant heap of charred dead meat the chef calls potpourri Pantaguel is the kind of lacerating satire that only a foreigner would submit.

My own recollections from 1996-98 played in the background while I read: medialunas at La Juventus, the train to Chivilcoy, evening light in the Tigre. The steampunk Waterworks Palace, anarchist okupas in the skeletons of unfinished buildings. The sound of existential exhaustion in Las Pelotas’ “¿Para qué?”

Incidentally, Montalbán’s characters play out themes described by Mempo Giardinelli in El País de Las Maravillas, written in the same period: the desperate self-importance combined with a diminishing faith in justice. The seduction of psychotherapy and plastic surgery. A fatalism at once cynical and arrogant. El desgaste política and the opacity of elite machinations. The seeming impossibility of reconciliation with the past. Carvalho the private detective takes his existential frustration out on culture and history by throwing books from his own eclectic library into the fireplace when he needs to blow off steam. (No! Not Piglia’s Artificial Respiration! Why not Martín Fierro?!)

The Buenos Aires Quintet can be enjoyed as detective fiction―with plenty of suspense, action, and sharp sardonic talk―but Montalbán also succeeds in capturing the feel of the place at that moment between a past no one really wants to think too deeply about and a future that counts too heavily on remembering what has happened. show less

This is without doubt both the most depressing and the most philosophical Pepe Carvalho mystery I've read. The novel opens with Pepe back in Barcelona (from his trip to Argentina) and the reappearance of Charo, who had vanished for seven years to Andorra as the kept woman of one of her former clients (he has paid for her to open a cosmetics store in Barcelona); she calls Pepe "the man of my life." But she is not the only one who will do so. Pepe has just acquired a fax machine, thanks to his show more office assistant Biscuter, and he receives endless and mysterious faxes from a woman who seemingly knows about all his cases; who she is, and the role she played in his life (and will play), is revealed about half way through the book. Pepe is supposedly investigating the murder of a young man who was involved in one of many cults, a satanic one in fact, and this investigation takes Pepe into the world of religion and cults and, lo and behold, many are politically connected and involved in, or against, the idea of statehood for Catalonia and other "stateless nations." Not much happens for stretches in the book as Pepe explores idea after idea, but the book was enjoyable and ultimately shocking. show less

A prominent Barcelona businessman has disappeared, telling his friends he's off on a journey to the South Seas; a year later, his body turns up, newly stabbed to death, on a building site in the city. The widow commissions hard-boiled private detective Pepe Carvalho to find out what happened to her husband during the missing year.

The investigation proceeds in traditional noir fashion, with Carvalho interviewing a series of people who were close to the dead man, and going to bed with some of show more them. But there's also a very clear element of social criticism, Carvalho looking with a jaundiced eye on the way the city is changing during the transition to democracy, especially the way that the class of people who made money out of it in Franco's time are reinventing themselves as new-style 1980s "entrepreneurs" whilst the left carries on with the usual internal squabbles and fails to seize the opportunity. And, trademark of the series, there is Carvalho's very close attention to what he and others eat and drink. Interviews with witnesses can easily stray off into detailed technical discussions about recipes, culinary heresies, and the right and wrong way to drink white wine — all of which, of course, end up telling us a lot about the characters concerned.

There's a spoilt little rich girl straight out of Raymond Chandler, but, perhaps unexpectedly, Carvalho is rather less given to actual drunkenness than most noir detectives. All the same, the pivotal scene of the story is a gloriously drunken bachelor evening of arguments about paella and poetry that leaves Carvalho with the kind of headache that can only lead to an inspiration about where to pursue his enquiries. There's another magnificent scene where he strays into a round-table discussion about detective fiction and things suddenly get very postmodern... show less

Dans J'ai tué Kennedy, nous apprenons que, dans une autre vie, notre anarchiste Pepe Carvalho, gourmet, grand lecteur et grand brûleur de livres, a fricoté avec la CIA. Cette constatation achronique/anachronique débouche sur un texte drôle, effronté, d'une belle force d'invention. Entre la politique-fiction, l'anticipation, l'espionnage, le polar noir, le pastiche du roman d'avant-garde, Manuel Vázquez Montalban s'en donne à coeur joie. Et nous partageons son délire sans réserves.'.