An Olympic Death (Sabotaje olímpico)

"You may have noticed his last name bears a passing resemblance to a very famous Sicilian literary detective. Andrea Camilleri called his character Inspector Montalbano in homage to Vázquez Montalbán and his detective, Pepe Carvalho. Pepe Carvalho is an amazing character, and why he’s not more in our public consciousness, I don’t know. He was the first of the great eccentric, philosopher, gourmand detectives. He is called Pepe Carvalho—with an h—to show that he comes from Galicia: his family are Galician immigrants into Barcelona. He is of the generation that moved from the countryside in the late 40s and 50s—the years of hunger, of the dictatorship—into the big cities to try and find work. The books are also paeans to Barcelona and how exciting it is as a city. In the narrative, Pepe Carvalho is a committed communist. He worked for the Communist Party, but he also did some informing for the CIA on the side. There is a sense that Pepe Carvalho was playing the dictatorship. Most of the books in the series start after the fall of the dictatorship and during the transition. They’re really fantastic books. Not only are they great detective stories, but they are fantastic books about this period. They are the books that, in a very approachable and noir-genre way, tell us about what the transition was like and the compromises that everybody had to make in moving from dictatorship to democracy. All the decisions: What do we talk about? What do we not talk about? What do we uncover? What do we not uncover? That’s a huge part of the Spanish cultural narrative and it continues to this day. I picked Sabotaje olimpico deliberately because I graduated in 1992, and all of us were obsessed with the fact it was Spain’s year for the Olympics and shot off to Barcelona to volunteer. There was the famous slogan ‘Barcelona, posa’t guapa,’ which means ‘Barcelona get yourself smartened up.’ In the book, Pepe Carvalho is like, ‘God, I hate this. I’m going away.’ He’s about to leave town for his shack in the country to cook lots of dishes from his Escoffier cookbook when he gets called by the IOC to come and investigate, because there have been some threats… But the background is that Barcelona is making itself smart for a global bun fight. Neighborhoods are being knocked down and people are being rehoused. Are the fundamental structures of the city being ripped apart, or is it for the best? In a sense, Barcelona 92 was the first gentrification story. Looking back now, when over-tourism in Barcelona is the huge story, I think it’s very interesting to see how it was right at the beginning. [SPOILER ALERT] And the bad guys turn out to be not international terrorists, but the City Council, the IOC and a guy called Mariscal. The graphics for the Olympics were all done by Javier Mariscal and his agency in Barcelona. It’s the best branding job that anybody’s ever done, but in the book, they’re the baddies. I just love this book. Pepe Carvalho is a great character. We should have more of Pepe Carvalho in this country. Also, as a story of Barcelona, of the beginning of something that is still very, very relevant, it’s a good one. And who doesn’t like a detective story set at the Olympics? We’re currently translating contemporary fiction. We haven’t navigated the estates of authors yet. We’re only a year and a half, two years old. We’re really new. We’re publishing two books from Spain, both by women authors. One is about the housing and construction boom and crash, and how that played out for Spaniards—rather than how we normally hear about it, which is what it meant for British investors on the Costa del Sol. The other book is about Benidorm, which is the absolute pinnacle of what goes wrong—or right, depending on your point of view—with late-stage capitalism mass tourism. They’re both fascinating novels."