With local colour
Ojos de agua*
Domingo Villar
Siruela, 2007, 187 pages
Javier Sánchez Zapatero
Translation:
One
of the defects that has weighed most heavily on the development of
the Spanish crime novel has been authors' insistence on making Barcelona,
and to a lesser extent Madrid , the only possible settings for crime
narratives. The emblematic nature of both places – as political,
economic, cultural and business centres – as well as the influence
of novel series by pioneering writers such as Manuel Vázquez
Montalbán, Andreu Martín or Juan Madrid, has been the
reason for the continual use of the chief geographical power centres
as settings for the plots of nearly the whole of the Spanish crime
tradition. The proliferation of crime authors and titles in recent
years has ended up with this identical character at a time when the
appearance of fresh contexts and spaces for novels has become possible.
Angel Vallecillo, José Javier Abasolo, Juan Ramón Biedma
or José Luis Serrano are some of the writers who have helped
to call a halt to the dependence on Barcelona and Madrid backdrops,
and have opened new avenues and possibilities for the Spanish crime
novel. Domingo Villar, a Galician who has for some years lived in
Madrid, has joined this ‘move' for the literature of the genre with
the publication of his first book Ojos de agua (Eyes like
water; Ollos de agua in the Galician original, which has
been translated into Castilian Spanish by the author), a magnificent
novel set in the town of Vigo, which demonstrates that it is not
only the big cities that conceal tales worth telling.
The appearance of the corpse of a young
teacher and jazz musician, who has been killed with unusual viciousness
and cruelty, is the novel's starting point. As if this were a classic ‘locked
room' mystery the site of the crime appears to be completely clean,
without any clues, prints or any kind of indication that might
make it possible to advance a hypothesis pointing to a solution.
The magnetic power of the novel's first few paragraphs draws in
the reader, who is from the start of the book intrigued to discover
the reason for the brutality of the killing and the solution to
an apparently insoluble case. And this magnetism does not slacken
for an instant thanks to the skill and competence of Villar's writing,
thanks to the realistic explanation of events that is gradually
revealed and in particular thanks to the magnificent figure of
the main character Leo Caldas.
Caldas, a regular contributor to a
local public service radio programme, is a taciturn, solitary police
inspector, who suffer from the melancholy caused by the weight
of absence characteristic of the genre's legendary heroes, and
whose patience in conversation and observation is contrasted with
the impetuousness and hostility of his assistant Rafael Estévez,
a policeman from Aragón who is unable to adapt to the particular
idiosyncrasy of Galicians, full of irony and ambiguity. As well as
being essential for solving the puzzle of the saxophonist's death
and the strange events it triggers, the interaction of the two characters,
both opposite and complementary – occasionally described, especially
in the case of Estévez, in an extremely caricatured manner – gives
the book a light tone that succeeds in putting a smile on the reader's
lips amid the novel's mystery and intrigue.
Caldas and Estévez, who are continually on the go in the
way of the European crime novel's contemporary protagonists, move
through various parts of Vigo and its coastal environs, which become
yet another character in the book. Described with a well-judged touch
of local colour – reflecting the nostalgia according with the author's
situation as an emigrant, the most universal Galician situation – the
surroundings through which the crowds of characters move draw a faithful
portrait of present-day Galicia . From gay bars to high society estates,
from green landscapes and coves washed by the Atlantic, to jazz clubs,
port settings and the legendary taverns in which the regulars greet
you as they arrive, and swathed in the eternal Galician rain – which
is present in symbolic and enveloping form in the first and last
of the novel's paragraphs – the spaces through which the plot passes
succeed in giving the book a characteristic ‘local colour' that marks
out Domingo Villar's offering compared with the rest of the current
batch of crime novels.
Composed with obvious echoes of Henning
Mankell's and Andrea Camillieri's detective novels, Ojos
de agua seems to have been created
to be the start of a series. Preservation of the secrecy that surrounds
certain aspects of Leo Caldas's past, as well as the apparent and
intentional light touch with which some secondary characters are
described who are destined to grow in future offerings, leads us
think so. The novel, which is already in its eighth reprint, has
been very successful, has deservedly received good reviews and will
shortly be filmed, all of which appears to ensure the continuation
of the series that is destined, after this first great outing, to
become one of Spanish detective literature's outstanding examples.
* Eyes like
water
