History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 7/10 · Translated from Spanish (original title Los mares del Sur)

• Plot: A businessman who said he was going to the South Seas is found stabbed on a Barcelona building site, and Pepe Carvalho traces his last year.
• Clues: Scattered through a society in transition, from corporate boardrooms to working-class estates.
• Reveal: Anticlimactic by design, the solution less important than what the investigation shows about Spain.

Carlos Stuart Pedrell, a wealthy businessman, told everyone he was going to the South Seas, like Gauguin. A year later he is found dead in a building site on the outskirts of Barcelona. His family hires Pepe Carvalho to find out where he really went.

Carvalho is an unusual detective: a former communist, former CIA agent, gourmet cook, and a man who burns books in his fireplace. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, a journalist, poet and communist intellectual, used him to chronicle Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy.

The investigation leads through the wealthy business classes and the poor suburbs Pedrell had helped build. It becomes a portrait of a society in which money, politics and memory are colliding, and in which old leftist dreams are fading.

The food is a constant presence: Carvalho cooks elaborate meals, often late at night, and the recipes are part of the book’s texture and wit.

The weakness is that the mystery is slight and the plot slow. Readers who don’t know Spanish politics may miss some of the satire. Carvalho’s misogyny can be off-putting.

The 7 reflects an intelligent, ironic and distinctive novel that won the Planeta Prize. It is one of the key works of Mediterranean noir, and it opened the way for later writers like Andrea Camilleri.