Tattoo is an early, 1974 work by the Spanish crime master Manuel Vazquez Montalban that has recently been translated by the good people at Serpent’s Tail publishing.

For readers of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano novels, this is where the Sicilian detective got his name, idiosyncracies and plots. Camilleri may have written a number of enjoyable books that together form a mildly diverting series, but they are not a patch on his Catalan inspiration. This is because until his death in 2003 Montalban operated in a different league altogether to the general run of modern European crime novelists. As the cliche probably runs, he is to Barcelona what Raymond Chandler was to Los Angeles.

Other crime novelists simply don’t have the raw materials that Montalban could draw upon, nor the creative chops to then turn them into crime fiction gold. At the heart of Montalban’s Pepe Carvalho books lies his own background as an apostate policeman, CIA agent and Marxist in a country dashing as fast as it can out of the shadow of fascist rule and a city hurtling into modernity. Then there is the food. And the sex. And the book burning.

Like detectives ever since Philip Marlowe, Pepe Carvalho, is outwardly cynical and laconic but inwardly melancholic, a disappointed romantic at odds with the modern world. When we first encounter him, Carvalho has already made his own separate peace and is no longer interested in any form of  ”improvement”. His world has contracted to a small circle of waifs and strays, and is almost totally focused on getting through the day and the twin sensual gratifications of sex and food. And yet, like Marlowe, he can’t quite shake off his own moral code.

Tattoo is not the first Carvalho novel, but it is the one where many of the series tropes – Carvalho’s epicurean food fundametalism, the book burning, the past associations, the love of a city even as it changes around him –  are all laid out. Montalban never explains Carvalho, but instead lays his life out detail by detail, each of which creates the context to the story evolving around him. In this case the story may be fairly slight but already in Tattoo it is clear why there is no greater character in all crime fiction than Pepe Carvalho.

Newcomers can read this without fear, converts can lap it up. Now about all the other untranslated Carvalho books…

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