Dark side of a sunny city
The Age
Saturday August 22, 2009
A Not So Perfect Crime By Teresa Solana Bitter Lemon, $24.99 CATALAN author Teresa Solana makes it clear why Barcelona is one of the world's great capitals of crime fiction. For English speakers, Barcelona and literature are synonymous with the post-modern, hard-boiled novels of the late Manuel Vazquez Montalban and, more recently, with Carlos Ruiz Zafon's bestselling gothic mysteries. Yet, these are just a few of the crime novels from Barcelona, most of which, unfortunately, remain untranslated and unknown to English speakers.Solana's debut novel is the latest crime story from the Catalan capital to become available in English translation. In some ways, A Not So Perfect Crime substantially deviates from the Barcelona tradition established by Vazquez Montalban in the 1970s. Far from the gritty streets of the Barrio Chino €” the inner city red-light district €” that Montalban's protagonist, Pepe Carvalho, made his own, the crimes in Solana's novels take place in Barcelona's upper-class suburbs. There they do things differently €” even crime. Indeed, the victim, an interior decorator and wife of a conservative politician, dies from eating poisoned marron glace!This is not a normal case for the novel's detective duo, Eduard and Borja, who usually investigate industrial espionage, dubious absences from work as well as the occasional €” and from their point of view, always disagreeable €” infidelity for the rich and famous, who are willing to pay a great deal for the pair's discretion.Solana's strength as a writer is character and in Eduard and Borja she has created two memorable personalities. They are the classic odd couple, which wouldn't be so remarkable if they weren't also twins, a fact they keep hidden, even from Eduard's wife. Eduard, an old, although not too committed, lefty, is happily married with three children. Borja, politically conservative for "aesthetic" reasons, is a bachelor dandy, whose wealthy girlfriend keeps him in the manner to which he has become accustomed, which includes a fondness, bordering on addiction, for expensive whisky and suits.While markedly different in place and tone from Montalban's novels, Solana's work nevertheless continues the late author's critique of post-Olympic Barcelona, particularly in his later novels. In Solana's novel, nothing is at it appears. The protagonists' office has false doors leading to an imaginary suite that is perennially being refurbished; their non-existent secretary has always just popped out, leaving behind a designer scarf and a hint of expensive perfume, and their computer, found abandoned on the street, doesn't work.Since Raymond Chandler first articulated the idea, readers, writers and critics of crime fiction hold firmly to the belief that hard-boiled novels engage with the society they seek to represent, whereas the Christie-esque cosy, enigma novels, with artificial settings of isolated manor houses, are seen to be removed from the world.Solana's novel proves the division to be false. Once the centre of anti-Franco resistance, Solana's Barcelona has become a living, breathing Euro Disney theme park in which surface doesn't just triumph over substance €” that is all there is. In Solana's satirical take on Catalan society, if nothing is at it seems then appearance is what matters. It can make you or destroy you and some are even willing to kill because of it.A Not So Perfect Crime is excellently translated by Peter Bush, an award-winning translator of Juan Goytisolo and Cuban crime novelist Leonardo Padura Fuentes. With a translation of Solana's second novel under way, English-speaking readers won't have to wait long for the further misadventures of these non-identical twins.Stewart King teaches Spanish literature at Monash University.
© 2009 The Age
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