Tattoo, by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

9781846686672
Serpent's Tail
2008
originally published as Tartuaje, 1976
translated by Nick Caistor
232 pp.




My first entry in my mini-series I call "What Would Montalbano Read?", taken from the series written by Andrea Camilleri. 

Tattoo is actually the second book in the Pepe Carvalho series, following Yo maté a Kennedy of 1972.  Normally I have this compulsive need to begin with book one in any series, and even though I can read Spanish pretty fluently,  starting with Tattoo  is fine by me.  It's a mystery novel, skirting the edge of noir yet not as edgy as one would expect in that particular genre.  Although Montalbán is known to be one inspiration for Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano series, the main character, Pepe Carvalho, is much darker in character than Camilleri's protagonist, and this novel is not at all as lighthearted as Camilleri's in tone, although it does have its moments.



The basic story revolves around the discovery of a drowned man floating in the ocean and the search for his identity.  Shortly after the dead man is pulled on to the shore, he is turned over on his back, where onlookers discovered he had no face -- it had been eaten away by fishes.  Quickly turning him over once again, a child discovers a tattoo on his shoulder blade reading "Born to raise Hell in Hell."  Senor Ramon, a local hairdresser and businessman, hires Pepe Carvalho to discover the identity of the dead man, and "what he did in life." He refuses to explain why he wants to know this information, and is willing to pay Carvalho handsomely for his time.  The investigation will not only  lead Pepe to the Netherlands and to the seedy back streets of Barcelona, but will leave him black and blue in the process. 

Carvalho is an interesting character who touts himself as being "an ex-cop, an ex-Marxist, and a gourmet."  He also worked for the CIA at some point.  He's in love with a high-class prostitute named Charo, who he admires partly because she always "wolfed down her food like a growing adolescent," since Carvalho believes that "nobody who is indifferent to food is to be trusted."  He helps protect her prostitute friends, despising  their pimps. He has a library of some 3,500 books on his home shelves, and uses their pages for fire kindling.  In Tattoo, he burns Lain Entrago's Spain as a Problem and even Don Quixote, although he's sad to see the pictures go up in flames in Cervantes' work. He's also a consummate gourmet who loves food, eating and a good wine to go along.  Carvalho is a man of little, if any, ideals: he  works "enough to live," prefers work to politics, and could care less about technological advances his field and considers himself "not even neutral...aseptic" about politics.   But he has his negative qualities as well: he's a  blatant sexist and a little strange, tending toward violence  -- in one scene, for example, he bullies a woman into giving him information by threatening to stick her head into the fire, and then when she delivers, he takes her to bed.  I sense some complexity coming in future installments of this series, and I'm not yet sure what to make of this odd man.  I can applaud him for some things, but for others, he's disgusting.

The plot  is so-so, although the mystery aspect keeps the reader focused on the story, especially while Carvalho is in the Netherlands. Some of those scenes were downright funny while some prompted the reader to wonder why he goes through what he does there.   I mean, you want to keep reading and find out who the dead guy is, why he was killed, and above all, why his identity is important to the owner of a hairdressing shop.  The action moves quickly,  but it's Carvalho's outlook on life and on Spain that are the most interesting facets of this novel.  It makes for interesting and intriguing enough reading that I've already ordered the next one in the series, The Angst-Ridden Executive, which is also published by Serpent's Tail, and recently found a few more that I didn't realize I had  hidden on my international crime fiction tbr shelves.

Would I recommend it? Yes -- it's more than readable, with its lightly-plotted storyline and  the thread of mystery running through the novel, but beware of the oddness of Carvalho's personality in a few places.  He's definitely not a character for everyone. 

 crime fiction from Spain

Deadwater, by Sean Burke

 1852426934
Serpent's Tail Publishing
2002
186 pp

 It's 1989, the scene is the Cardiff (Wales) docklands area of Butetown, a small community commonly known as Tiger Bay. A prostitute who had been slated to testify against two rather nasty brothers -- Tony and Carl Baja -- has been killed in her apartment after changing her mind and returning home. The next day Jack Farrisey, a local pharmacist, wakes up covered in blood with no recollection of anything that had happened the night before, since he was in an alcohol-induced amnesiac state. The local police want this crime solved, because as of two years earlier, the docklands area had been slated for regeneration and redevelopment, so  unsolved murders or murders in general would not be drawing new businesses to the area. The police latch onto the Baja Brothers, who swear their innocence,  but Farrisey still needs to know exactly what happened to him that night, and he has to rely on his friend Jess for answers. But Jess is chasing his own demons that deal with Jack and his pregnant wife.  Both make statements to the police, along with some other members of the community. But to make matters even more complicated, Jack's wife, an attorney, has decided to take the brothers' case to try to prove they didn't do it.

While Deadwater is a novel of crime fiction, it's also an examination of impending loss and futility.   As a child Jack lived in and fully  experienced the community and its "spectacular noise, of cockatoos, penny-slot pianos, of hurdie-gurdies, irrepressible Breton onion sellers, West Indian newspaper touts and stentorian fish hawkers." He spent time with his dad down on the docks. On the other hand, he also remembered the 1960s, when ethnic groups were relocated in an attempt to clear out the area slums because authorities feared

the sight of a creole community evolving its own way of being, its own ethics of spontaneity, respect and cheerfulness -- without need of statute, politician or book..

And now, with redevelopment and change looming over this area that Jack calls home, the very identity and future of the Butetown/Tiger Bay community is at stake:

The promise of redevelopment seemed less an attempt to rejuvenate than to raze a community with its own, self-regulating and irregular forms of justice and peacekeeping.

Mirroring the community's impending decline and the futility of any kind of hope for its future is the downward spiral of Jack's friendship with Jess, as  it leads him down a path that will ultimately end in betrayal and worse.

Deadwater is not a feel-good kind of novel at all, and stays that way right up until the last word. It is bleak and despairing, dark and gloomy. In tone it reminded me a little bit of Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor novels, in which the reader feels like he or she is watching a train wreck about to happen but is somehow glued to the spot and can't look away.  Sean Burke is a wonderful writer whose prose seems a bit out of place in a crime fiction novel because it is so descriptively lyrical (Yes, I know that "lyrical" for prose is one of those words that is way overdone, but it actually fits here). He's established such a forceful sense of place that it is not difficult to imagine the loud pubs, the dark streets, and the docks while you read. There is nothing to distract from the plotlines, and Jack's character is well defined to the point where he becomes real for the duration.

This is one of those novels that are not for the casual mystery reader - it is filled with tragedy and is definitely not for the faint at heart or people who think there is some measure of redemption in any situation. At the same time, I couldn't help but be blown away by Burke's rather heady writing which captured my attention from the outset and never let me down. I would recommend it, definitely, but beware the darkness.

fiction from Wales