Eduardo Mendoza's The Mystery of the Enchanted Crypt (#NovNov)

 'In this shite-house of a country even the lunatics are fascist.'

Eduardo Mendoza's The Mystery of the Enchanted Crypt (1979, translated by Nick Caistor, 2008) is narrated by a lunatic. Well, at the start of the novel, he's an inmate in a lunatic asylum. That comment is made by one of the staff doctors. But Dr. Sugrañes, the head of the asylum, tells our narrator he's recovered. (We might have some doubts.) It's only a bureaucratic snafu that's keeping him inside. And if only he'll perform a small service, just a very small service, for Inspector Flores, he can win his freedom.

The narrator was a police informer before he fell foul of the police, and was locked up in the asylum. (Exactly why an asylum and not prison is not made particularly clear.) He's presumed to know the streets and have sources of information.

The case Flores wants solved is the disappearance of a fourteen-year-old girl from a convent school. Six years before there was a similar disappearance, but the case was dropped and the mystery never explained when the girl returned a few days later. Flores wants to know what happened, make sure this girl returns, too, but wants deniability if he needs it. Hence our narrator is put on the case.

The 1979 date is important. The novel is set in the immediate post-Franco era in Barcelona. Flores was a policeman in the Franco era; he remains in his position after the death of Franco. The narrator was locked up in the Franco years. Was his case political as well? Probably.

It's funny, or I thought so, though some of the jokes are a bit insider-y:

'...all she ever bought were the Planeta prizewinners, and you know what they're like.' [109]

I immediately looked up to see if Mendoza had won the Planeta prize. He had not. But they didn't hold it against him (or maybe they did?) because he won it later.

'I hailed a taxi I had spotted, jumped in and told the driver, 

    "Follow those two cars. I'm from the secret police."

    "So am I," he said. "Which branch?"

    "Drugs," I improvised. "How is the wage bargaining going?"

    "Badly, as usual," grumbled the bogus taxi driver. "We'll see what happens at these elections. I'm going to vote Felipe González: what about you?"

    "Whoever my bosses tell me to." [143]

González is a socialist. Perhaps not whom the secret police should be voting for. And:

'Seeing a dentist weep so despairingly was strangely moving.' [151]

Which made me laugh out loud, though maybe that's just me... 

There's also a running joke about how our narrator can't get a shower; he was in the middle of a soccer game at the insane asylum when he was first put on the case and never gets a wash until the end.

It's also got the shape of a P.I. novel and the solution isn't bad.

Politics, humor, plotting. Pretty good all-in-all. This is the first in a series by Mendoza with his mad detective.

Mendoza is a contemporary Spanish novelist (b. 1943) and celebrated--he won the Premio Cervantes in 2016--but only some of his works have made it into English. This is the first thing by him I've read, but I'm definitely going to keep an eye out for others. Wikipedia says his works are divided, like Graham Greene's sometimes were, into 'novels' and 'entertainments'. If so, this was an entertainment--and indeed it was--but substantial enough, too. 

I'm not really sure where I heard about him, probably someone in the bloggy world, though. If it was you, it's OK, you can now raise your hand...

At 192 pages, and not particularly dense ones, I'm guessing it's 50000 words, maybe a little long for the category, but I say it's a Novella in November!

Bioy Casares and Ocampo's Where There's Love, There's Hate

This mystery novella is narrated by Professor Huberman, an amusingly pompous doctor. "I belong, I must admit, to the brotherhood of Hippocrates." The doctor has literary pretensions as well, and is, at the beginning, retreating to the seaside in order to work on a screenplay of Petronius' Satyricon, which he has been commissioned to write.

Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo were husband and wife, both writers; this novella of 1946 is their only collaborative effort. They were part of an Argentine literary circle that also included Jorge Luis Borges. They were all, it seems, fond of detective fiction; Bioy Casares and Borges collaborated as well on a series of detective stories called Six Problems For Don Isidro Parodi, which I've previously read, but must admit to not really remembering.

Professor Huberman heads off to a seaside resort named Bosque del Mar in order to achieve the quiet he needs to work on his Petronius screenplay. The resort is ridiculously difficult to arrive at: it's miles and miles down a single-lane plank road; drive off the road (and Huberman is arriving in the dark) and the car will be buried in sand. And a storm is arriving to complete the isolation. It's a perfect setup for a country house murder.

Not that Huberman knows anything about that. (Wink, wink.) He carries his Petronius with him and uses it to disparage detective novels:

When will we at last renounce the detective novel, the fantasy novel and the entire prolific, varied, and ambitious literary genre that is fed by unreality? When will we return to the path of salubrious picaresque and pleasant local color?

Of course, while the Satyricon might possibly be said to be known for its picaresque-ness, there's certainly nothing salubrious about it, salacious rather; and I would not say the Satyricon involves pleasant local color, unless your idea of pleasant local color involves drunken and debauched ancient Romans. But since Huberman has also just alluded to the Moonstone, perhaps we can't take him entirely seriously.

As is suitable for a country house murder, everyone who is trapped at the end of this road is at one point or another a suspect, though most of the suspicion falls on the sister of the victim and her intended. There are several red herrings and the resolution is good, though not spectacular.

All in all I would say it was fairly amusing, but for me the book doesn't quite have a successful tone: Bioy Casares and Ocampo can't quite resolve how sincerely they're adhering to the conventions of the genre. It's OK to have a certain knowingness about the field: it's not possible to write as if Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie hadn't existed. But this neither takes the genre entirely seriously nor does it have the broad comedy of something like Murder By Death.

I can't really say what the cover has to do with the book, but since the figure there has his hat pulled low and his collar turned up, I'm going to call him shadowy.

Golden Age. Shadowy (or Ghostly) Figure. My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger's Hunt.

This book has also been on my shelves for two years, so it is one more in the My Reader's Block Mount TBR Challenge.