Una reunión del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de España. Se apagan las luces. Aparece asesinado el secretario general. A partir de ahí empieza una investigación paralela entre el comisario Fonseca, designado por el gobierno, y Pepe Carvalho, detective privado contratado por el PCE.

review of
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Murder in the Central Committee
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 16-18, 2019

According to the brief author's bio on the 1st page of this bk, Montalbán was "A leading member of the Catalan Communist Party". His fictional hero, however, the detective Pepe Carvalho, is an ex-communist who doesn't necessarily look kindly on the Communist Party. This creates an interesting tension when he's hired to find out who murdered their General Secretary at a closed-door meeting where only communists were in attendance.

I've praised the political acuity of everything that I've read by Montalbán so far but I remember particularly loving the 1st thing I read by him, The Buenos Aires Quintet (read my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/382361-don-t-let-them-get-away?chapter=1 ), & this one has probably joined that one in my high esteem.

Montalbán depicts the comrades of the central committee as having endured extreme hardships during the time of Franco-ruled Spain. At the same time, he shows how things changed once Franco was gone.

"'In my time people gave their life to be on the central committee. Now they haggle over every weekend.'

"Santos smiled at Julian Mir, the chief steward.

"'I wouldn't go back to those times.'

"'No, Santos, nor would I. But I get sore when I see how inconsiderate certain comrades can be. Some travel seven hundred kilometres by train to come to the meeting, while others stay put in Argüelles, half an hour away by taxi.'" - p 1

"Garrido made a special stop to receive the crushing embrace of Harguindey, twenty-one years and a day served in prison with the superhuman obstinacy of the time. Garrido survived Harguindey's slap on the shoulder. He told a joke to Helena Subirats that produced a roar of laughter more like an ovation.

"We still can't believe that we are able to meet, Santos thought; that Fernando is here, that a van-load of policemen are protecting the side-entrance to the hotel." - p 4

For those of you not familiar w/ the history, General Franco was the military leader in charge of suppressing the democratically-elected Spanish Republic in the time known at the Spanish Civil War. Franco ruled from 1939 until his death in 1975. Communists & anarchists wd've lived in hiding during those times. Many were killed or put in prison. Murder in the Central Committee was copyrighted in 1981, a mere 6 yrs after Franco's death. It was published in 1984. I went to Barcelona in 1978 but left the next day upon seeing the nervous teenagers w/ machine guns guarding places. I went to Madrid in 1984 where I found a generally convivial atmosphere, still celebrating Franco's demise 9 yrs later.

In the story, the general secretary of the central committee is assassinated in the dark.

"'What do you make of the appointment of Superintendent Fonseca to head the official investigation?'

"'It's a bad joke. Fonseca is still remembered by communists as one of Franco's choice hangmen.'" - p 10

"Thousands of madileños had already passed in front of Fernando Garrdio's mortal remains, while the impressive police presence had been backed up by a deployment of troops in the outer suburbs.

"'Excuse me, an opinion-poll for Radio Nacional. What do you put the murder down to?'

"'To international fascism — what else?'

"'But how do you explain that he was killed in a closed place, where the only people present were communists, members of the central committee?'

"'In the only way a good communist can explain it. It was international fascism.'" - p 11

Indeed. As the communists approach Carvalho to take the job of finding Garrida's murderer, they express concern about having interrupted his breakfast.

"He had never heard him say anything so cheap. Carvalho remembered him twenty-two years earlier, standing before the military court on a charge of rebellion. Then Salvatella had declared that he recongized only the courts of the Republic, not the one trying him. Evidently disturbed by his lack of respect, the military judges increased the sentence demanded by the prosecutor." - p 14

Throughout, the communists are shown as being full of integrity & courage. Nonetheless, Carvalho is shown as somewhat antagonistic to them, possibly throwing the reader off to think that Carvalho's attitude is more of a deserved criticism than it turns out to be.

"'What do you want me to do? To find the murderer or to help you cover up the murder?'

"'Maybe we were given the wrong information. But they told us you uncovered murders, not covered them up.'

"'This case is beyond my powers. I'm used to starring in black-and-white films, and now you're offering me a 70mm super-production with governments and police departments at the centre.[']" - p 16

Montalban dissed Borges in The Buenos Aires Quintet & I can understand that Borges was too privileged & too detached to notice that the government that supported him was killing, torturing, & disappearing dissident intellectuals & others. But in Murder in the Central Committee he writes: "counter-cultural bookshops where the nazi Hermann Hesse lies next to a manual of some yogi from Freguenal de la Sierra." (p 22) I read Hesse when I was a teenager & I don't have any great attachment to him but Montalban's accusation seemed extreme to me so I checked to see if there was any verification online & got this as response to "Hermann Hesse & Nazism":

"Hesse observed the rise to power of Nazism in Germany with concern. In 1933, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann made their travels into exile, each aided by Hesse. In this way, Hesse attempted to work against Hitler's suppression of art and literature that protested Nazi ideology. Hesse's third wife was Jewish, and he had publicly expressed his opposition to anti-Semitism long before then. Hesse was criticized for not condemning the Nazi party, but his failure to criticize or support any political idea stemmed from his "politics of detachment [...] At no time did he openly condemn (the Nazis), although his detestation of their politics is beyond question." From the end of the 1930s, German journals stopped publishing Hesse's work, and the Nazis eventually banned it." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Hesse

I don't think I can accept Montalban's harsh judgement here. Carvalho burns bks in his fireplace. Montalban always dedicates a little time to the bks chosen for burning.

"He took down Engels's The Housing Question, and one look at 'Part Three: Supplementary Remarks on Proudhon and the Housing Question' convinced him that it deserved the fire. He tore the book in three, fanned the pages out so that they would catch fire more easily, and began to contrusct a building of twigs and branches on the ruins of one of Engels's most inadequate works." - p 23

At least he's implied to've read it. He gets a threatening phone call.

"'For your own good, we advise you not to act foolishly.'

"'You mean the book-burning? Who are you: Bernatán or Garcia? Or maybe Engels?'

"'Don't play the clown. Leave the dead in peace, particularly the ones you know. He got what was coming to him. You won't be warned again.'" - p 24

Imagine a detective novel where the detective says: "Ok, I don't want to be harmed. Never mind, I'll drop the investigation." Of course that's not going to happen.

The murder has huge political implications that various sides are raptly rushing in to take advantage of.

"'You should look at the Madrid press, which is directly linked to political and economic pressure-groups. They already take it as proven that the communists are to blame. "Communist Patricide"— that's the exact title in Ya, as you'd expect from the paper of the Church and the right-wing Chrsitian-Democrats. ABC, holding a candle for banking capital and the royal household says "Settling of Accounts in the Central Committee". And what about political trend-setters around the palace? Well, Cambio 16 headlines with "The Struggle for Power". El Pais has a well-known ex-communist on its editorial staff and did a rational account of the events. But it could not refrain from morbid insinuations between the lines: "Growing Opposition to Garrido in the Party".'" - p 27

If you're interested in seeing the front page of an anarcho-syndicalist paper called "CNT that resurfaced after Franco's death scroll down the page here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Magazines.html .

Some people might not care much about how the media would handle such a case but I think it's central to how mind-control works in contemporary society. You cd get the shit beaten out of you by a cop & find yourself in the newspaper & on TV as a "rioter". That wd be news to you but it wd also be just the right touch to criminalize you from here to eternity.

Leveder is a smart-ass communist who gives older communists a hard time. He offers to spontaneoulsy translate serious writing into contemporary slang. Here, he's harrassing Cerdán who spent time in prison w/ Carvalho.

"'Something by Lenin?' Credán searched his memory so hard that it seemed to creak. 'Well, one of the April theses: an open break with the provisional government, pointing towards the transfer of all government power to the soviets.'

"Cerdán returned to his bibliography as Carmela laughed uncontrollably at Julio's simultaneous translation.

"'Bourgeois democracy sucks. We gotte get it together at the grass-roots. Street credibility . . .'

"Cerdán was consulted.

"'What the hell's that?'

"'It's the language of my tribe: the jive-Leninists.'" - pp 67-68

Well, waddya know. Carvalho follows his dick & ends up at the shitty end of a blackmail scheme.

"He woke with the feeling he was being watched. By the light of the small opaque lamp, he rediscovered the space of the room and the two or three objects he had had time to register: the shiny clothes-hanger, the cracked porcelain wash-basin. He shot out his right arm in search of Gladys's body and found a strident, glass-shattering scream which pierced his chest like an ultrasonic alarm. He turned his head. Seated on a mattress, desperatly attempting to cover the flesh sticking through the slits of her blouse, a terrified teenager with sunken eyes continued to scream while looking at Carvalho as at some vermin. He sat up and tried to cover her mouth. But he stopped when the door sprang open and two huge, breathless men flooded into the room as if they were a hundred. One of them began to spit out flash-lights at such a rate that Carvalho was forced to close his eyes. The scream had changed into hysterical weeping..

"'He tried to rape me! he hit me!'" - p 102

Now imagine a different scenario. Carvalho realizes that a teenager has been put into bed with him after he was drugged. He gags her immdediately & then goes to the side of the door with a heavy object. As soon as the blackmailers storm in he beats them on the head until they're not moving. No need to be careful about not killing them. Too bad it didn't go that way. Eventually, Carvalho is interrogated by a professional who wants to know who the detective discovers the murderer to be. This professional laments the changes happening in his business.

"[']Now the market is full of bungling amateurs. For example, Gadafy is doing the unspeakable, subcontracting agents from other secret services. That's right. So you can find yourself working in the same case as agents of either side. It's not serious.'" - p 115

Remember Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya? This bk was copyrighted in 1981 so Gaddafi was still pretty powerful & had another 2 decades to go before being killed. As I recall, the comic "World War 3" claimed that he outlawed absentee landlordism. If you lived there, you owned it. That wd be enough to get the US riled up about killing him. What I don't get is how he managed to combine Islamic law w/ socialism.

"Colonel Gaddafi, was a Libyan revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He governed Libya as Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977, and then as the "Brotherly Leader" of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011. He was initially ideologically committed to Arab nationalism and Arab socialism but later ruled according to his own Third International Theory.

"Born near Sirte, Italian Libya to a poor Bedouin family, Gaddafi became an Arab nationalist while at school in Sabha, later enrolling in the Royal Military Academy, Benghazi. Within the military, he founded a revolutionary cell which deposed the Western-backed Senussi monarchy of Idris in a 1969 coup. Having taken power, Gaddafi converted Libya into a republic governed by his Revolutionary Command Council. Ruling by decree, he ejected both the Italian population and Western military bases from Libya while strengthening ties to Arab nationalist governments—particularly Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt—and unsuccessfully advocating Pan-Arab political union. An Islamic modernist, he introduced sharia as the basis for the legal system and promoted "Islamic socialism". He nationalized the oil industry and used the increasing state revenues to bolster the military, fund foreign revolutionaries, and implement social programs emphasizing house-building, healthcare and education projects. In 1973, he initiated a "Popular Revolution" with the formation of Basic People's Congresses, presented as a system of direct democracy, but retained personal control over major decisions. He outlined his Third International Theory that year, publishing these ideas in The Green Book.

"Gaddafi transformed Libya into a new socialist state called a Jamahiriya ("state of the masses") in 1977. He officially adopted a symbolic role in governance but remained head of both the military and the Revolutionary Committees responsible for policing and suppressing dissent. During the 1970s and 1980s, Libya's unsuccessful border conflicts with Egypt and Chad, support for foreign militants, and alleged responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing in Scotland left it increasingly isolated on the world stage. A particularly hostile relationship developed with the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel, resulting in the 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya and United Nations-imposed economic sanctions. From 1999, Gaddafi shunned Arab socialism and encouraged economic privatization, rapprochement with Western nations, and Pan-Africanism; he was Chairperson of the African Union from 2009 to 2010. Amid the 2011 Arab Spring, protests against widespread corruption and unemployment broke out in eastern Libya. The situation descended into civil war, in which NATO intervened militarily on the side of the anti-Gaddafist National Transitional Council (NTC). The government was overthrown, and Gaddafi retreated to Sirte, only to be captured and killed by NTC militants." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_Gaddafi

All of the communists of the central committee are suspects in Garrido's murder. Leveder, the smart-ass, among them.

"Leveder was really and truly indignant.

"'From everything I've said, you will conclude that I did not kill Garrido. At bottom, I had a great affection for the old man, even though I was losing my historical respect for him. Given his age and position, he should have set off a real reform of the Party. He should have carried destalinisation to [its] ultimate conclusion, arriving at an identification of rank and file and leadership without which any project for a mass party is no more than a swindle. He should have used his authority from the days of underground activity to launch an internal cultural revolution. I repeat, cultural, because every Communist party has an internal culture, an awareness of its identity conditioned by its evolution as an organic intellectual.[']" - p 130

As for this desalinisation program?! I don't know. How wd they pickle Stalin w/o salt? The whole Russian black market might collapse.

"He had not been inside a bookshop since the day in Amsterdam when he had to watch someone involved in the tattoo case." - p 135

That reference, of course, was just made so that I cd encourage you to read my review of Montalban's Tattoo: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2570126786 even though Montalban never hd any idea of who I am & I didn't read that particular bk until last yr. But what about Garrido's murder for fuck's sake?

"[']If the Franco regime couldn't do it, then the mafia certainly can't.'

"'Was Garrido killed by the mafia?'

"'No, I'm talking about the Trilateral Commission. Who else, eh? Garrido and eurocommunism weren't up their street. The image of a civilised communism, the kind there has to be, was disarming a lot of anti-communists. And that drove them wild in the Trilateral.'

"'The Trilateral can kill someone without taking his life. It can start off a crushing campaign of character assassination.'

"'It was them. No doubt about it. They want to smash an image, to rule the eurocommunist programme out of court.[']" - p 161

Don't hear much about the Trilateral Commission anymore. The bk entitled Trilateralism — The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, edited by Holly Sklar was copyrighted in 1980. Maybe Montalbán knew about it. The back cover blurb says:

"What do Jimmy Carter, John Anderson, George Bush, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Heny Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, Walter Mondale, and Andrew Young have in common with David Rockefeller?

"Answer: THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION.

Unfortunately, for me, Jimmy Carter was the closest thing to a good president that the US has had in my lifetime. I sh pobably read the bk.

The communists had a helluva time under Franco.

"He opened it and looked for the file. 'Son of Emerenciano and Leonor. Father: a miner and member of the Communist Party of Spain since 1932. Mother: a back-up activist in the coalfield until her arrest in October 1934. Amnestied by the Popular Front in February 1936. Married at the Ebro front in February 1938. Exiled 1939. Birth of Félix Esparza Julve in Toulon, January 1940. Father active in the French Resistance. Mother deported with her child to the Massif Central. Domestic service for a high-ranking German officer saved her from a concentration camp. At the end of the war, the father entered Spain with the maquis. Arrested on the outskirts of Villafranca del Bierzo in 1947. Died of TB in El Dueso prison in 1951.[']" - p 168

This bk is a tragedy no matter how you unpack it. Let it be an educational one. ( )

This is the book for you if:
You are interested in post-Franco Spain
You want a locked room mystery
You are interested in Franco Spain
You wonder exactly what went on with the communists and socialists in Europe.
You want to know about Catalan cooking
Macho Barcelona is OK with you
Political diatribes make you tingle
( )

le cadre (dirigeant?) a bien plus d'intérêt que l'intrigue, évidement... Un cliché d'une époque toute récente, un autre monde. ( )

Another Pepe Carvalho mystery. When the general secretary of the Spanish Communist party is stabbed to death when the lights go out in the closed room where the central committee is meeting, Pepe is asked to fly to Madrid to solve the case, based on his early membership in the party and despite that having being superseded by a stint working for the CIA. However, there are mysterious (and violent) people who don't want the murderer to be found (or who perhaps want the person they want to be the murderer to be fingered for the culprit) -- are they CIA, KGB, somebody else? It is often not clear who is who, perhaps for Pepe as well. Of course, there are the de rigueur explorations of cuisine, sexual encounters, and brutal attacks on Pepe (the last of which I skim rapidly as they are a little too gruesome for me). However, the plot allows Vázquez Montalbán to satirize the self-importance, bureaucracy, and stilted language of the communist party, and Madrid as opposed to his home of Barcelona, as well as allude to the continuing influence of the KGB and the CIA.