WATER-BLUE EYES. Translated by Martin Schifino. By Domingo Villar. 167pp. Arcadia. Paperback, Pounds 11.99. 978 1 90514 776 2.
Water-Blue Eyes is a piece of hard-boiled crime fiction, a genre so often brought to the boil that one wonders how the writers handle the cliches. Does the detective drink? Of course. Is he a little depressed? You bet. Has his wife left him? Come on! Domingo Villar does something more with the genre. In luminous prose he lets the Mediterranean spaces speak, setting his story in Galicia among the "fjord-like inlets known as rias . . . swaths of green land here and there . . . shielded from the pounding of the Atlantic by streamlined, white-sand islands".
Detective Caldas is an ambassador for Galician culture: a man of taste with an extensive knowledge of jazz, he knows where to get the best octopus, how to soak up the bitter saltiness of sardines on sliced potato, and how to appreciate a local hurdy-gurdy called the zafona. Occasionally his role as cultural ambassador becomes a little too obtrusive. Caldas is paired with a detective from Zaragoza, Rafael Estevez, and it is through this slap-happy sidekick that regional divisions are emphasized. Galicians can never give you a straight answer and Estevez responds to this ambiguity with violence.
The murder in the novel is a gruesome one which strikes at the heart of the machismo culture epitomized by Estevez. A saxophonist, Luis Regiosa, has been killed by an injection of formaldehyde to his penis. This blackened organ deeply troubles Estevez and, looking through the musician's CDs of female vocalists, he concludes that Regiosa was a "Dorothy". Only a homosexual would have reacted so bitterly, he believes. Estevez's homophobia is a recurrent motif here, but his instincts about the dead man prove right.
The cast is narrow, including a sinister white-haired man from the Zuriaga Foundation, and there is a nod to Chandler in the kinky goings on among the super-rich. Chandler would have had fun with the book's icy enchantress Mercedes Zuriaga, but she appears too late to lead the detectives into immoral games. Instead, one is left with a sense of insubstantiality. Martin Schifino's translation is witty and inventive.
