One afternoon, Commissioner Méndez stood in front of the last two standing buildings in his Chinatown, the one that had been falling down since the late 1980s, with the first demolition on Calle Sant Oleguer. The pickaxe took the streets where the Nen, the Mole and the Palito jumped from the terraces. But neither Francisco González Ledesma (1927-2015), nor Francisco Casavella (1963-2008), nor Pepe Carvalho himself –recovered by Carlos Zanón in Identity Problems (Planeta, 2019)– walked around here in vain.
Going back, towards the old Rambla in the 1920s, Andreu Martín looks for La quarta noia per l’esquerra (Crims.cat, 2023), in the murky and scoundrel city. When Lolita greeted happily and, shortly after, she fell from the top of her building in Escudellers. Josep Sala i Culell investigates The Silent Death of Dolors Bernabeu (Pòrtic, 2023). Alberto Valle is set in 1959 with (Roca, 2022), a detailed criminal chronicle, when jazz fans, sixth fleet marines and gentlemen in search of a rogue life converge in Plaza Reial.
A few decades later, nothing ago, a dark spot stretches out in the center of the map. And with that ink of the attack on La Rambla (and that of the political and social shock of that 2017, with Puigdemont’s unilateral declaration), Javier Cercas writes the second installment of this remarkable series, committed up to the neck, which follows life and Melchor Marín’s adventures, a formidable guy, the anonymous mosso who killed the terrorists in Cambrils. In Independencia (Tusquets, 2021), he points to those historic families that, in the words of the talented Eduardo Palomares, have run the show in Catalonia for decades, and share the benefits. In Igual que ayer (Asteroid Books, 2022) Viassolo, eternal aspiring private detective, serves cocktails at a party, where the young mayoral candidate, coming from that rancid lineage with an Esade degree, is running.
Viassolo and his unemployed friends with master’s degrees explain the Barcelona of the crisis wonderfully. And not to mention the fat connoisseur, who has died in the after-dinner restaurant, to the horror of the owners and workers. The times are not here to appear in the black chronicle, the fat man must be removed from there and taken to his house at any rate. The Pes mort of the notable Llort (Crims.cat, 2019), like the impossible boy of Temps mort (Crims.cat, 2020) are insurmountable guys who may run into the members of the unique and troubled Hernández family, detectives with headquarters in the neighborhood of Sant Andreu. They are The Good Children (Tusquets, 2021) by Rosa Ribas and from these times. Some as disoriented as the characters of Jordi Llobregat in Quasi poetic Justice (Crims.cat, 2021). Or like the judge created by another judge, Graziella Moreno, in Los animales de ciudad no lloran (ADN, 2022). An exemplary phrase for Carvalho de Zanón, which tastes tapas made by the Chinese, and for the character of Antonio Iturbe, who in The infinite beach (Seix Barral, 2021), intuits the authentic in the bar most opposite to the emblematic, there in the Barceloneta.
What is surprising that it is a plateau of Uruguayan origin who, in La llama de Focea (Destino, 2022), tells us with love, rigor and nostalgia what this city was like before and after so many things that have happened to it. We owe it to Bevilacqua, by Lorenzo Silva.
