Tattoo: A Pepe Carvalho Mystery Reviewed @ TQC

The latest review at The Quarterly Conversation is Ahmad Saidullah’s critique of Tattoo: A Pepe Carvalho Mystery by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, just published in English by Serpent’s Tail. Here’s a taste:

In Montalbán’s works, Spanish society is critiqued as decadent and corrupt and the path to solving a crime is often a compromise with truth. Justice, particularly in the Pepe Carvalho books, is thuggishly violent, instrumental and retributive rather than redemptive or distributive, given over, rather than to the state, to individual agency or vigilantism, or is often self-administered. This is not surprising as the literary roots of the Spanish noir novel lie in a rejection of the optimistic theme of Spanish regeneration espoused by the 1898 Generation of Rubén Darío and Valle-Inclán. The major faultlines for this consciously oppositional form lie between the Republican and Nationalist camps and the Castilian and Catalan divides. (Some of these divisions are also handled subtly in Rebecca Pawel’s excellent murder mystery Death of a Nationalist.)