Report from Barcelona, part II: from the desk of Rebecca Pawel

(the first in the series of dispatches can be found here.)

All Generalizations are Untrue Including This One:Towards a Mediterranean Crime Novel

Friday, 21 January 2005

Sorry, Cara, I missed the presentation of Thierry Jonquet and Jakob Arjouni this morning (mostly because it took place at 10:00 am, when I was peacefully asleep.  (I didn’t get in until after 2:00am, in my defense.)  In a few hours I’m off to “Sex, Lies and Newspaper Articles” which promises to be interesting also, but in the meantime I thought I’d

summarize the conclusions of the panel on the Mediterranean crime novel.

Basically, Petros Markaris suggested that the crime novels “what I like to call the kissing countries — because everybody kisses everybody here” have certain common characteristics: a concern with politics, and with the transition from dictatorship to democracy, because dictatorship has been so much more a part of daily life here, a focus on specific cities as protagonists in the novels, and above all of these…food.  (His argument was that France and Italy have a different political experience in the last fifty

years than the rest of the loosely defined Mediterranean, but that a concern with food is  eternal and unchangeable.)  “I read the novels of Ian Rankin and always the inspector is eating pizza and beer!  I feel compassion.”

Petros’ comment seemed to be borne out by the plan for the evening, which was a group dinner at Casa Leopoldo, the preferred restaurant of the fictional Pepe Carvalho, and Pepe’s creator, the late Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who this conference is intended to honor.  It is also borne out by Donna Leon’s Inspector Brunetti.  However, Francisco González Ledesma (whose books I am afraid I am going to have to read) neatly punctured this generalization by saying, “I am a child of hunger.  I grew up with rationing and going without.  Barcelona used to be filled with little smoky places with congealed tortillas, squid that had been stewing in its own ink since the
flood, and bottles of wine where you didn’t want to ask what the liquid inside was.  I’ve eaten this food, my detective has eaten this food, and we’re still alive and healthy.  So no, I don’t think food is essential.”

Actually, my personal thought is that the “gourmand detective” (a la Brunetti, or Roderic  Jeffries’ insufferable Inspector Alvarez) is nowconsidered a “cute” thing, but that when Vázquez Montalbán did it with Pepe Carvalho, it was as much a sick perversion as drug or alcohol abuse.  In a city of starving people, a grotesquely fat man who lingers lovingly over details of fine dining is an asshole, not asensitive soul.  The whole transformation from deeply disturbing flaw to endearing quirk (“blanqueando” or “whitening” as it’s called in Spanish, since the genre is “negra” or black) speaks to the theme of Donna Leon’s talk, which was about cultural tourism.  Unfortunately, she talked more about Venice (which she obviously loves) than about mysteries, so I won’t summarize her comments here.

The moderator, Andreu Martín, added some interesting comments about the city as  protagonist, and added the controversial statement that a true “noir” novel has to have an urban background, because the variety of characters is impossible in a rural setting.  Although I generally do feel that hard-boiled lends itself to urban while cozy is a more rural sub-genre, I’m not comfortable with quite such a sweeping statement.  (If only because my own third book is extremely rural, and I don’t think of it as precisely cozy.)  Martín also said some things that were dead-on though.  He raised the interesting question of why, if we dearly love the cities we write about, we show them in such a horrible light?  His answer: “If you have a car that’s your car that you care about, and something’s not running right and it’s making a funny noise, you open the hood, and get grimey.  Of course, if it’s a rented car and it starts running badly, you don’t open the hood, you just keep going and return it.  But if you love it, you want to expose the grimey insides.  And that’s what writing about a city that you love is like.  We write because we love these cities deeply, but also because we are very critical of them.”

That struck me as a beautiful metaphor, and also as adead-on accurate assessment.  Any reactions?  Agreements?  Disagreements?  I don’t write about my own city because I think having the critical distance is impossible, but there are definite echoes of it in my work,
both the good and the bad.  Anybody else want to weigh in?

Finally, Petros Markaris contrasted the themes of Mediterranean vs. Nordic/Anglo-Saxon crime novels, noting that while torture by the state was outlawed and disappeared far earlier in Northern Europe than in Southern Europe, Scandinavian and English novels seem far more likely to feature killers who elaborately torture their victims before finishing them off, whereas in the Mediterranean torture was a common reality, but torture in detective novels remains rare.  It’s worth noting here that while the conference is theoretically about EUROPEAN novels, the designation “Mediterranean” was specifically expanded to include North Africa, and writers like Yasmina Khadra.  Also worth noting that I discovered a novel called HARRAGA (an Arabic word meaning “the ones who burn” [papers and documents before the arrival of the law]) which deals with the trafficking of illegal immigrants in the Straits of Gibraltar, and sounds like an interesting complement to Steve Torres’ first Precinct Puerto Rico.  I will report back on the novel once I start reading it.

That’s all for now, folks.  Sorry about the failure to report on northern Europe.  (Icky, icky cold place.  Brrr…  It’s a pleasant 15 degrees Centigrade here.  Another reason why going back to an unpleasant 15 degrees Fahrenheit in New York is unappetizing.  Sigh…)