Recently read: Manuel Vazquez Montalban’s Southern Seas

I’m fond of detective stories set in unusual locations, whether that is a dusty town in West Texas or a city in Sweden. It’s nice to be reminded that there are other places for fiction to occur than New York City and Los Angeles. Through reading other blogs, I recently found an author with a number of books that fit the bill. Montalban’s eccentric detective, Pepe Carvalho, eats and drinks his way through his investigations, in a sensitive and atmospheric way that is reminiscent of some of the early Simenon mysteries. Written in 1979 and set in contemporary Barcelona, the author provides not only a good plot, but provides insight into post-Franco Spanish politics, as well as the ultra-rich and the powerful people who nonetheless have unhappy lives and are touched by crime. In this book, a rich businessman searching to recreate the lifestyle of painter Paul Gauguin disappears for months. Everyone, including his wife, assumes he went off to Tahiti in his hero’s footsteps. This seems to not have been the case, once he turns up dead in a building site he had connections with. I enjoyed this book until the end, when I felt the epilogue added nothing to the story and was merely gratuitous violence.