I'm down in Torquay today, taking part in the Agatha Christie Festival, of which more before long. In the meantime, here's a guest blog from Nick Sweet:
"Apart from
having its Spanish detective, Inspector Velázquez, wrestle with a heroin habit,
my new crime thriller, The Long Siesta, is unusual
because there is a sense in which the history of the Spanish Civil War finds
itself being rewritten within its pages. Actually this is all dealt with in the
‘book within the book’ that I worked into the novel.
Let me explain. It is
often argued by historians that the Civil
War might not have taken place at all had General Franco not been able to make
his way over to Las Palmas, from where he could easily fly to Spanish
Morocco, where his fellow Rebels were eagerly awaiting his arrival so that the
plan of attack on the Spanish mainland could be thought-out and ultimately
launched, thereby kicking off the conflict. But Franco was on the island of
Tenerife, and had already been given permission by the Ministry of War to make
an inspection tour of Gran Canaria barely a fortnight before; and so he knew
that if he were to make a new request, it was more than likely that permission
would not be granted for the trip. In short, he needed a pretext to travel to
Las Palmas; and the subsequent death of General Balmes conveniently provided
him with one
.
While the question
as to how General Balmes died is still a moot one among historians, it is clear
that Balmes’ death benefitted Franco, by giving him a funeral to preside over on
the island of Gran Canaria. The question is, did the future Generalísimo have
his fellow officer bumped off, or was Balmes’ death brought about by suicide or
the result of an accident?
Readers of The Long Siesta will be happy to
have this question answered for them; because—surprise! surprise!—it happens
that one of the characters in my novel turns out to be the General’s killer.
Balmes’ death, in fact, as arranged by my character (whose identity I’d better
keep in the dark, to avoid ruining the story for readers), facilitates the
start of the Civil War. Strangely, perhaps—or perhaps not so strangely—my
killer is motivated by love. He threatens to ‘kill somebody important’ if the girl he lives won't have him; and, well, despite being fond of
him, she is young and feels overwhelmed by his advances, so she refuses him.
Her decision ultimately leaves her wondering whether the
Civil War might have been averted, had she only been a little less timid.
I wanted to
link episodes which took place during the Civil War (which of course raged from
1936 to 1939), with events in the more recent past (in this case, the summer of
1998); and managed to find a way of doing this that focused on a killer who was
busy murdering priests in Seville in the most violent and gruesome fashion
imaginable. In Spain the Catholic Church has always played an important part in
the life of its citizens, and it also played a key role in the Civil War; so I
wanted to bring the clergy into the novel.
I was lucky, in that my reading of
history—in this case, Paul Preston’s magnum opus on General Franco—provided me
with a true to life murder mystery that has yet to be solved to this day. I
took this as a way in, without really knowing where I was headed; then, after a
priest is found dead in his own home on Seville’s Calle Viriato (apparently
after calling an escort agency and asking for a gay young man to be sent over
to his place), a second priest shows up in the Guadalquivir. Are the two
murders linked? Well, Inspector Jefe Velázquez is convinced they are, and he
sets out to investigate… And while he was about it, he dragged yours truly
along after him as I clung to his coat tails."
Thanks, Nick, and best of luck with the book.
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