Review: The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and other stories by Teresa Solana tr. Peter Bush

The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and other stories by Teresa Solana translated by Peter Bush, August 2018, 210 pages, Bitter Lemon Press, ISBN: 1912242079

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

I’d never been held up at gun-point before or seen anyone die (in real-life, that is), let alone like that. Bang-bang, a couple of shots and you’re on your way to the other side. You’ll soon see when I put the photos on Instagram …

THE FIRST PREHISTORIC SERIAL KILLER is a collection of short stories by Barcelona-born novelist and translator Teresa Solana. It’s a lively, bizarre, witty, cruel, crude and sometimes picaresque collection. The first five tales start with the story that gives the collection its name: three dead Neanderthals found with their heads bashed in with a rock, one after the other, prompt the weakling of the tribe to find out how they died (after all he has to keep his place in the group somehow). Be prepared for an anachronistic tale with a sharp eye for social status and a sly humour. The following four stories cover motifs such as domestic murder and a solution to corpse disposal, death and satire in the art world, ghosts in a quandary – and vampires in the era of sunblock. The remaining stories in the collection make up the prize-winning “Connections”; a kaleidoscopic collection of eight crime stories involving characters and events in and around Barcelona, all touched by a shooting in a Barcelona pharmacy.

This was my first foray into crime fiction in short story form and I was worried that I would grow tired of what I thought could become a predictable format. But Solana is not predictable and the outcome was that I enjoyed these stories hugely. Translated by Teresa Solana’s husband Peter Bush, this translation must be one of the closest matches to the writer’s voice and intentions possible. Solana’s earthy, dark wit; her ability to speak through varied characters; her satirical eye for the layers and workings of Barcelona society (which speak to everyone everywhere) and her finely crafted invention that knits together the stories in “Connections” mean that I shall definitely be on the hunt for a full length Teresa Solana novel.

Very highly recommended – for those with a taste for murder, the surreal, and possibly – the stories of Saki.

Lynn Harvey, August 2018

Publishing Deal - Antonio Hill

Some belated publishing news. Spanish author Antonio Hill will be published in English next year. From Booktrade:

Doubleday Editorial Director Jane Lawson has acquired WEL rights in two books by debut Spanish crime author Antonio Hill. THE SUMMER OF DEAD TOYS, set in contemporary Barcelona, introduces Inspector Hector Salgado, a detective with a complicated past, a tendency to violence, and a penchant for cinema. Lawson says: 'Roll over Wallander, Harry Hole and Aurelio Zen. This series hits all the spots for Euro crime fans. Could Spain be the new Scandinavia?'

Doubleday will publish in trade paperback in early summer 2012.

Publishing Deal - Victor del Arbol

From today's Publishers Lunch Weekly email:

Spanish novelist Víctor del Arbol's THE SAMARAI'S GRIEF, about multiple betrayals, personal and political, pitched as evocative of Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, and set alternately in the pro-Nazi Spain of 1941 -- when an aristocrat becomes involved in a plot to kill her Fascist husband, only to be betrayed by her lover -- and during the attempted Fascist coup of 1981, when a young lawyer is accused of plotting the prison escape of the man she successfully prosecuted for attempted murder five years earlier; with the Japanese sword of the title providing -- and ultimately severing -- the link between the two women's lives, to Holt, for publication in February 2011.

Eduardo Mendoza

I've just added a new-to-me Spanish author to the Euro Crime database. Telegram Books appear to be translating Eduardo Mendoza's trilogy about a detective in a mental asylum: The Mystery of the Enchanted Crypt was published in October 2008 and the follow-up, The Olive Labyrinth, is scheduled for October 2011.

Released from an asylum to help with a police enquiry, the quick–witted and foul–smelling narrator delves deep into the underworld of 1970s Barcelona to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a teenage girl from a convent school.

Helped only by his ageing prostitute sister and the voluptuous nymphomaniac, Mercedes, the narrator's investigations take him deeper into a mystery involving murdered sailors, suicidal daughters, a web of organised crime and a secret, underground crypt.

Our hero, Gonewiththewind, has once again been released by the police from a lunatic asylum in Barcelona. The last time he helped solve the mystery of an enchanted crypt and a missing girl, only to find himself once more incarcerated. This time his mission is to recover a briefcase filled with money lost under very peculiar circumstances …

Mysteries and mishaps follow each other at breakneck speed, as the hapless detective delves beyond humour and the absurd to the frontiers of the truly surreal.

A brilliant send-up of the detective genre and of Spanish society, The Olive Labyrinth promises to have you in stitches.

Both titles are translated by Nick Caistor.

Trailer - The Moses Expedition

I rather enjoyed listening to God's Spy by Juan Gomez-Jurado last year - the action takes place during the election of the next Pope following Jean-Paul II's death. The 'hero' is Father Fowler, a military trained priest. He returns in Contract With God which came out last August in the UK and which will be published as The Moses Expedition in the US this August.

Here is the trailer for The Moses Expedition:

Who is Ricardo Cupido?

Private Investigator Ricardo Cupido is Spanish author Eugenio Fuentes's series character and makes his fourth appearance (in English at least) in the recently published At Close Quarters (tr. Martin Schifino), he describes himself on p51:

He’d never been someone given to confidences or talking about himself, but with the passage of time he was becoming even more secretive. He hid from everyone his disappointments, his loneliness, his fears and how fed up he was with his job, the profession that led him to believe that no person can love another forever. He kept those impressions to himself, where no one might see them and point out their painful harshness. Looking back, he realised he’d been able to salvage very few things from the wreckage of time, that the wealth of his youthful dreams had rotted before they could come true. He no longer hoped to have children. Nor did it seem likely that he would have for a woman feelings as intense as when he had first loved. He no longer believed that an ideology could make the world a better place; and as for the human condition, well, he’d seen his fair share of evil and misery, and had concluded that some men can only do harm. He’d seen people die and people kill. It was true that, when he thought of the future, the moral landscape he identified in himself was not lacking in dignity, but it wasn’t the kind best shared with anyone else. He was over forty and knew that, unless he did something about it, he’d get lonelier as each year passed. Up to this age, he often told himself, most of the people one has met and known are alive, but from now on the balance will start to even out, until the presence of the living weighs as much as the memories of the dead. And a little later everyone would start dying around him, if his number didn’t come up first.

New Title from Serpent's Tail

The July-December 2008 catalogue from Serpent's Tail lists a new title in translation from the late Manuel Vazquez Montalban. The second in his long running Pepe Carvalho series, Tattoo, originally published in 1974, will be published in English in August.

Synopsis:
Pepe Carvalho, ex-cop, ex-marxist and constant gourmet, is working as a private detective in Barcelona, when a body is pulled out of the sea, its face so badly destroyed that the only way of identifying it is through a tattoo that says: 'Born to raise hell in hell'. A local hairdresser hires Carvalho to find out who the man is. Meanwhile, the Barcelona police make a connection between the murder and local drug dealers and prostitutes, and they begin raiding bars and brothels.A lead on the identity of the murdered man brings Carvalho to Amsterdam, where he gets entangled with a drug gang. As the pace accelerates, Carvalho realises that this is no straightforward John Doe case.

In an interview (undated) with the Australian journal SCAN, Serpent's Tail publisher, Peter Ayrton, confirmed his commitment to publishing more Montalban:

SCAN: One wonderful crime writer you have translated is Manuel Montalban who sadly died in a Thai airport while changing planes on his way back to Europe after a recent visit to Australia and New Zealand. You've published several of his books, most recently The Buenos Aires Quartet, in which Pepe heads off to Argentina. There are several other books in that series still not translated, from the first to the last. Do you have plans to bring out more?

PA: It's great really that we are slowly establishing the Pepe series and actually selling Montalban's books. It's a long process. Word of mouth helps when people talk to their friends and everything, and it's been helped by having some of the books published by Duffy and Snellgrove. It helps here to have an Australian publisher, I should think. And what a great character Pepe is! Montalban loved food, sex and radical politics, so he had his priorities in life right! And these are only his crime novels we're discussing; he wrote other novels, non-fiction books and had a weekly column for El Pais. His literary production was phenomenal. Yes, we'll be doing the first one in the Pepe series, I Killed Kennedy, and at least two others, The Man of My Life, and Tattoos, at the rate of one a year. The remaining books in the series are uneven but those three are very good.

As well as the fact that The Man of My Life came out in 2005, the following comments make the interview seem a bit dated, given the current enthusiasm for crime in translation:

SCAN: In the past you have said that it's a hard-sell to persuade people to read crime novels in translation; why is that?

PA: There are particular problems about crime in translation; a lot of crime books have a lot of street slang and that's always a serious problem for the translator. In a way it's easier to translate literary fiction than it is genre fiction. The other problem is that there are so many good American and British crime writers that the market isn't desperately crying out for translated works.

Read the whole interview here.

Update: Read the Euro Crime review of Tattoo.

New translated authors to look out for in 2008 (1)

The number of European authors being translated into English continues apace. The Bookseller reports on a new acquisition by Arcadia:

Blue-Water Eyes, the first instalment in Domingo Villar’s Inspector Caldas mystery series, will be published in March 2008, with a translation by Martín Schifino. World English rights were acquired from Joachim De Nys at Argentine agency Guillermo Schavelzon & Asociados. Set in the author’s native Galicia, Blue-Water Eyes has Caldas investigating the death of a young saxophonist.

In fact the synopsis is now on the Arcadia site, where you can also see the cover:

Amid the aroma of the sea and the Galician pines, a young saxophonist is found dead in his swanky flat overlooking the beach. The murder seems to have taken place after a sexual encounter with a lover: there are two glasses filled with whiskey in the living room, and the dead man, Luis Reigosa, is tied by the wrists to the headboard of the bed. But the way he was killed makes it impossible to obtain any more clues about his activities that night: his thighs, stomach and groin are horribly burned, and his genitals look hideously like a toasted cashew. The unusually cold-blooded and cruel murder is assigned to Leo Caldas, a disheartened police inspector still searching for his place in the world. The case unfolds between inviting nights at the jazz clubs and the tense, affected atmosphere of upper class Vigo.