Domingo Villar (1971–2022)

One of the reasons that I read crime books that have been translated into English from another language is to see foreign cultures through a familiar genre lens and pick up on how their attitudes, assumptions and behaviours differ from my own British ones.

British crime books are usually soaked in small details of how our society works, the assumptions we make about each other based on external clues, the influence of class and the things we take for granted about crime, policing and the administration of justice I look for the same things in foreign crime novels.

Crime fiction may not be an accurate representation of the culture that generated it but reading it gives me the same kind of buzz that I get from people-watching in a foreign city. I may not understand everything I see but it's all made more vivid by being new and different.

'Water-Blue Eyes' took me to Vigo on the Spain's Atlantic coast. I've never been to that part of Spain so I expected it all to feel new. I hadn't expected it to feel so disorienting. The book was entertaining but I felt that some of it was slipping through my fingers. Some of this was because I lacked the context to know whether the behaviour of some of the characters is as eccentric as it seems to my British eyes or whether they are the local version of normal.

I also feel that I'm missing out on some of the humour. For example, it seems that Galicians are very resistant to giving unqualified yes or no answers to questions, which incenses a detective who has only recently transferred to the area.

The Englsh in the book is also a little odd. It's not grammatically incorrect or even hard to understand. It just sometimes sounds alien to my ears. Take the title for example. In Spanish, it was called 'Ojos de Agua' which literally means 'Water Eyes'. Clearly, that doesn't work in English, where we would quickly move towards eye-watering or watery eyes, neither of which captures the point that the murdered man in this story has startlingly blue eyes. The translator has gone for 'Water-Blue Eyes'. I've never heard water-blue used as a colour in English and certainly not as an eye colour, so the title only made sense to me once I read a description of the dead man's eyes. A lot of the English seemed that way to me: unfamiliar but comprehensible in the given context. This may have been a style choice by the translator, keeping the novel distinctively Spanish rather than British but I don't speak Spanish, so I can't tell.

Putting the foreign nature of the book to one, what was 'Water-Blue Eyes' like as a crime novel?

Well, firstly, it's not for the squeamish. The murder method was unique. vicious, cruel and horribly cold-blooded. I think it will make any man shiver at the thought of it happening to them. The violence in the book happens off-screen but it provides a constant backbeat to the story.

I found the two main detectives hard to believe in. The lead detective, Leo Caldas, seemed more focused on food, drink and jazz than on solving the crime. He was persistently moody without being introspective and he relied on his intuition to an implausible degree. His sergeant, a large short-tempered, violent man behaved so badly that It seemed the public would have been better served if his superiors had arrested him rather than giving him a badge, handcuffs and a gun. He is occasionally useful as an aid to exposition on the rare occasions when Caldas tries to order his thoughts but otherwise adds nothing to the story except chaos and some antic humour that always failed to make me smile.

Most of the plot is linear, with the pieces falling together almost despite Caldas' heavy reliance on intuition doing his work for him. It turned out that there was a reason for this and a fairly clever one which provided a twist at the end of the tale. Unfortunately, while the mechanics of the twist worked well, the delivery was a little lacklustre and felt anticlimactic.

There was enough in the story to encourage me to read the next book in the series, 'Death On A Galician Shore' but I won't be in a hurry to bring it to the top of my TBR pile.… (altro)

A local fisherman washes up dead on the shores of a small Galician village. It is assumed to be suicide, but Inspector Leo Caldas is not convinced; the strap binding his hands could not have been tightened by the dead man. A look into his past links him to a shipwreck and the loss of the experienced Captain Sousa many years before. There are rumours in the village of sightings of Sousa, but that is impossible. Caldas digs into the story of the shipwreck with the two remaining survivors, both of whom are reluctant to talk.

The plot and pace of this story are fairly pedestrian, although Villar manages to rev things up a bit and throw a few plot twists in towards the end. The unfamiliar setting adds interest, but Caldas is not really that engaging a central character, and the book overall was just OK.


… (altro)

Una mañana, el cadáver de un marinero es arrastrado por la marea hasta la orilla de una playa gallega. Si no tuviese las manos atadas, Justo Castelo sería otro de los hijos del mar que encontró su tumba entre las aguas mientras faenaba. Sin testigos ni rastro de la embarcación del fallecido, el lacónico inspector Leo Caldas se sumerge en el ambiente marinero del pueblo, tratando de esclarecer el crimen entre hombres y mujeres que se resisten a desvelar sus sospechas y que, cuando se deciden a hablar, apuntan en una dirección demasiado insólita.… (altro)