An Olympic Death

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View books by Manuel Vazquez Montalban.

labyrinth - Rated
First published 1991 in Barcelona as El laberinto griego. Translated by Ed Emery.

Cocaine deals, heroin overdoses -- they're all in a good cause, as Barcelona detective Pepe Carvalho discovers as he juggles two women and two cases. It's a few months before the Olympics start in his home town and everyone is gearing up for them. Capitalism is triumphant, Communism a fond memory.

An Olympic aerialist has tumbled to earth; he hauls his wheelchaired body around the gym his lover now bosses. She has left her husband, the publishing magnate Brando. Beba, the young Brando girl, gives her father nightmares. While he sleeps she is cruising the mean streets where the pushers live, going God knows where, returning only to present him at breakfast with a series of overnight lovers his own age. Carvalho's job is to find out what she's doing and stop her. Brando fils doubles his father's fee. That's the simple case.

Carvalho assigns his assistant Biscuter, a dwarfish Archie/Bunter, to trail Beba. Meanwhile he leads the beautiful Claire and her companion Lebrun in search of the Greek husband who left her in Paris. He taps an old comrade, turned Olympic official, for information. A painter friend gives them entrée into the maze of midnight streets and fashionable dissolution. Artists and models guide them to a warehouse mausoleum of abandoned industrialism. Another Greek, the young Dimitrios, is to be found at the same time.

For its thorough exploration of the netherworld of sunny Barcelona, for its strange humor and pungent characterizations, for the way the detective finally shows he lives by a code and not by whim or a desire to settle old scores, this novel -- and the rest of the Pepe Carvalho series -- become highly recommended. Stack alongside your classics from around the world.