A happy day yesterday, as I managed to track down two more Pepe Carvalho novels (in English, of course, as my Spanish reading skills are pretty poor). Pepe Carvalho is one of my favorite detective series, the story of a former-communist and former CIA agent turned private detective working out of Barcelona. Carvalho is also a Galician living in Barcelona, a total foodie (to comical proportions), very smart and even more cynical, making him a good way for author Manuel Vazquez Montalban to mock and critique many aspects of Spanish society and the world.

For the past year or so, I find I have been reading a lot of genre fiction. In part, I have been trying to think about what makes a story/series/character popular. I guess my assumption is that often we take a lot of these well-known stories for granted, but there had to have been something there at the beginning, some kernel that excited people and inspired the popularity in the first place. So I have read some Ian Fleming, John LeCarre, Raymond Chandler, and the like. It’s interesting stuff, especially seeing how much slower and lower-stakes the conflicts could be just a generation ago. Other times, you can see some good writing going on, even among writers who perhaps grew more hack-like as time went on.

Anyhow, in the process, I have stumbled across the Carvalho series. The first one I read is still my favorite, Southern Seas, in part because it is set in the late Seventies and has a lot of twisted politics in it. I also really liked An Olympic Death, which talks a lot about how Barcelona was changing during the run-up to the 1992 Olympics (even if some of its AIDS-related storyline has ages poorly).

All the Carvalho books provide great looks at a Barcelona that has so totally changed over the past generation … and yet has not changed as much as most people think. Vazquez Montalban has a style that reminds me a bit of Nikos Kazantzakis in its earthiness (although definitely less literary than Kazantzakis), and Carvalho is a bit of a Zorba character.

I also find it interesting the Vazquez Montalban, who was from Barcelona originally, would choose to make his signature character hail from the opposite side of the country.  Was there a reason for this? Commentary on Catalan nationalism? The politics of Franco-era Spain (when he began the series)? Unfortunately, I just don’t know enough about the author or the country to say.

The new Carvalho books I picked up yesterday are Murder in the Central Committee and The Angst-Ridden Executive, both early books in the series, from 1977 and 1981 respectively. I’m really looking forward to reading both.