Manuel Vazquez Montalban died in 2003, leaving behind a body of work to rival any in modern crime fiction. From the mid 70s on he traced, via the medium of the detective novel, the emergence of Barcelona as a global city and recorded the excitement of rapid change – but change that always feels like defeat.

Drawing heavily on his own experiences, Montalbán’s alter ego, Pepe Carvalho, is a man with a compromised past and a shattered faith in the future. Carvalho doesn’t like the new homogenous city and is disillusioned by the forces prospering in a country still riven by the scars of the Franco years. But Carvalho isn’t raging, he’s defeated and he knows it. A communist in his youth, a disappointed pragmatist in later life and a gastronome throughout, Carvalho’s world has shrunk to include only his surrogate “family” of waifs and strays, his private detective work and his sensual pleasures – drink, sex and above all, food.

Having made his separate peace Carvalho is an aspiring live-in-the moment nihilist – albeit one who cannot quite rid himself of his world weary romanticism, his sense of honour nor his resourceful pragmatism. Most of the crimes he investigates centre on naked big business, but the books are never didactic. Instead they are funny, warm, absurd, philosophical, poetic and touching. There is love in the depiction of his “family”, of his prostitute sometime girlfriend; his ex-party member now vagabond informer; his assistant who lives behind the office curtain; and his partner-in-food-worship next door neighbour. Then there is the city itself. Montalban might mourn the passing of the barrios of his youth, but he is every bit to Barcelona what Chandler is to LA or Ian Rankin to Edinburgh.

In The Buenos Aires Quintet, first published in 1997, now available in a lovely new Serpent’s Tail edition, Carvalho’s uncle asks him to find a family member missing in Buenos Aires. Although initially reluctant, Carvalho wants out of Barcelona and decides to accept. All he knows of Argentina is Tango, Maradona and the Disappeared but during the course of The Buenos Aires Quintet, Carvalho discovers a country undergoing its own painful emergence from tyranny.

Painted on a much broader canvas than other Carvalho novels, The Buenos Aires Quintet has a valedictory feel, as if Montalban is summing the whole series up before leaving the stage with a flourish – pulling down the curtain as he goes. As he continues his search the characters Carvalho draws around him become more even eccentric than his “family” in Barcelona – a sensual professor; a cross-dressing compere; an old roue; a scared but cynical minister; an honest cop; rich oligarchs; a sinister Captain. As the beatings, disappearances and murders pile up, the whole thing takes on the feeling of a mad parade with all the elements of the tango – sex, death and melodrama – present and correct. As in Spain, the darkest forces aren’t purged and the traumas of the dirty war shape the national psyche – perfect for a detective story.

The Buenos Aires Quintet may not be the best place to start with Montalban, but with a climactic dinner resulting in murder and mayhem, it is a fitting end to the Pepe Carvalho series. Carvalho returned to Barcelona one last time in a coda, The Man Of My Life, but The Buenos Aires Quintet is the real finish and a detective novel like no other.

Later this year the excellent Serpent’s Tail will issue another early Carvalho novel, Tattoo, and most of the series is now in print. All are worth reading and all are in one way or another quite brilliant.

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