It’s a sure fire winner when you read a story about the black market, policemen and ‘reds’ set in post-Civil War Spain, written by an American, that really grabs your attention. This becomes an act of heroism on her part when you discover that the main character is a phalangist, a sergeant in the police force (guardia civil) and a card-carrying fascist.

This Spanish style drama, with its mix of Romeo and Juliet, Carmen and a hint of Hemingway, unfurls in the frightened and starving city of Madrid, a place where pride, arrogance, clandestine meetings, rage and forced surrender mix with thread-bare coats, disillusionment, black shirts, bloodied communists, processions of the defeated and the coats of arms of the victorious. This story about a search for vengeance is nicely balanced between a conventional investigation and ideological clashes.

Sergeant Carlos Tejada de Alonso y Leon was one of the resisters who attacked the red militia at the Toledo Alacazar with his friend Paco, corporal Francisco Lopez Perez. As luck would have it, it falls to Tejada to lead the investigation into the suspicious death of a policeman (guardia civil) in a street in Madrid, a death that takes place just hours after the triumphal arrival of the nationalists (Francoists) into the capital. The same twist of fate brings Viviana looking for her niece’s exercise book, dropped near the body when the young girl flees in fear after hearing the gun shot. These two events bring together the destinies of Viviana and Tejada with death as their companion. Death saturates the air of this agonising and defeated city, the death of a friend, the death that Tejada executes according to his prejudices and the death that Viviana defies as she spits in his face. All in all, a very Spanish death.

This tragic fable written by the New Yorker Rebecca Pawell won the Edgar Alan Poe prize for best first novel in 2003. This was well deserved, not least for the excellent account of the historical context which relies, in large part, on the creation of psychologically rounded characters and on an atmospheric narrative that succeeds in saturating the text with the greyness and resentment characteristic of the post-war period. All of this adds to the credibility of the story. Such realism is emphasized further by the author’s choice of narrative perspective, an approach that works well if you exclude the last notes of the score which appears to be more of a concession to Yankie cultural codes than the natural finale to the tragedy.

This is because Rebecca Pawell has the audacity to centre the story on a thoroughly dislikeable character, uniquely counterbalanced by his opposite, the Republican militia man, Gonzalo. Although he is of the moderate variety, Tejada is, for all that, still a fascist of the worst kind who, merely on appearances, condemns a woman whose only crime is to find herself a few meters away from the body of a policeman but who is above all marked with the sign of the losers as a communist.

The author has the good taste not to inflict upon us ‘the baddie with a heart of gold’, a mistake that would have spoilt everything if she had given into the temptation to tell a story using American prototypes… Unfortunately, this is not something she can resist for the whole of the novel. She succeeds, however, in creating a credible character and, from that starting point, shows us what is human about him. The attraction Tejada’s feels towards the young woman, even though she is a ‘red’, is due solely to his conservative values, to her appearance of respectability and to the pride that she communicates by her example – the epitome of the Spanish cliché of the ‘poor but honest woman’ an outdated notion that is as conceited as it is redundant. However, this renegade young man, who deserted the family home, does not take any special pleasure in brutally interrogating a suspect, although he does not hesitate to get his hands dirty if needed. It is his stance as a professional investigator that lessens the disgust we feel for him as a reader, as well as his honesty in the search for the truth. We feel a grudging respect for him that redeems him somewhat and makes him bearable as the main character.

After having set out a solid narrative framework, supported by a dramatic central notion, Rebecca Pawell cannot resist returning to American models and ends her novel in topsy-turvy fashion with a Hollywood flourish which cancels out what could have been a superb ending. That said, no one is perfect and this novel has enough good points to make it a real pleasure to read.