#RivetingReviews: Max Easterman reviews EVEN THE DARKEST NIGHT: A TERRA ALTA INVESTIGATION by Javier Cercas

Javier Cercas is professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Girona and one of Spain’s best-known and most popular writers. His fifth novel, Soldiers of Salamis (also translated by Anne McLean) is a million-seller and, like much of his writing, is about ‘historical memory’, with its focus on the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent state created by General Franco. Cercas is also a frequent contributor to the Catalan edition of the daily newspaper El País.

Even the Darkest Night, though, is something of a departure for him, being the first in a planned series of police procedurals set in the rural backwater of Terra Alta, in the far south-west of Catalonia. Though here too, the Civil War remains an issue: in 1938 Terra Alta was part of the Battle of the Ebro, which was a disaster for the Republic and destroyed the town of Corbera d’Ebre. Memories are long and bitter, even in the back of beyond. But this is the least of the problems facing the book’s central figure, police officer Melchor Marín, when he is first posted to Gandesa, the comarca (county) capital some four years before the events in this book.

Marín is not your average investigator and around a third of the novel is devoted – through flashbacks – to his back story: and a surprising one it is. His mother was a prostitute, who brought him up in the Barcelona working-class district of Badalona, his nights filled with the comings and goings of her clients. He spent several teenage years in prison for being a member of a Colombian drug cartel, where he became obsessed by Les Misérables – a book he found in the prison library. He comes to see himself in the main characters:

‘… he thought of Jean Valjean and of his certainty that life was a war and in this war he was one of the vanquished … But most of all he thought of Javert … of Javert’s integrity and … his sense of justice.’

The policeman Javert, and the news that Marín’s mother has been murdered, inspire the young criminal to turn his life around and to become a policeman himself. On his release, he manages, with the help of a mysterious but cunning lawyer, to join up. He gets involved in hunting down a group of terrorists and wins the sobriquet ‘hero of Cambrils’, when he kills four of those involved in the attack. But it is precisely to escape this notoriety and possible reprisals that he accepts the posting to Terra Alta, where, his immediate superior tells him, ‘nothing ever happens’.

And so we first meet Marín at the Adell’s country residence, where something quite definitely has happened. Paco Adell, in his eighties, runs the biggest business in Terra Alta, a printing company, with branches in Eastern Europe and Latin America. He and his wife are found brutally murdered, tortured to death. At first it looks like a professional job: there are few clues, the crime scene is wiped clean and because the victims are big names, the case is taken up by the regional crime squad. Terra Alta is engulfed by the national media, and the police are under pressure to solve the crime quickly. But for Marín, the answer crystallises around possible enemies rather than professional killers: who hated the Adells enough to do this? Marin’s wife is a local (a librarian whom he married after some months of heated discussions about Les Misérables!) and she knows the family well:

‘The Adells are like a tree that gives a lot of shade, but doesn’t let anything grow around it. They control everything … half of Gandesa belongs to them, so they give people work in their factories … the truth is that Adell was a despot.’

It could be anybody local, then … The Adell factory manager, Josep Grau, has a different take on this:

‘Were there lots of people who didn’t like Paco and cursed him? Of course! People always complain about those in charge. [But] believe me, if it weren’t for Paco Adell, Terra Alta would be dead. Everything else is a fairy tale.’

There are some leads, but they gradually dry up and the Adell case goes cold. Marín is told to drop it. But, having failed to solve his mother’s murder, he is determined not to abandon this one. It soon becomes clear that Melchor Marín’s professional and private lives are entwined in ways he can hardly imagine, and his unofficial investigation leads him to experience the darkest night of his life …

Javier Cercas tells this tale with firm assurance and an instinctive understanding of the dramatic pause that’s crucial to a good thriller. Each time the case hits a snag or a revelation, we are diverted to another detail of Marín’s past – all beautifully translated by Anne McLean. But at no point does the narrative feel artificial or irrelevant. As the facts and events unfold, Even the Darkest Night comes to a brilliant and quite unexpected conclusion. I have the feeling that Terra Alta is not going to be the place where ‘nothing happens’ for much longer.

Reviewed by Max Easterman

EVEN THE DARKEST NIGHT: A TERRA ALTA INVESTIGATION

by Javier Cercas

Translated by Anne Mclean

Published by MacLehose Press (2022)

Read The Spanish Riveter here or order your paper copy from here.

Buy books from The Spanish Riveter through the European Literature Network’s The Spanish Riveter bookshop.org page.

Max Easterman spent thirty-five years as a BBC broadcaster. He was a lecturer in journalism for seventeen years at Huddersfield University and is today a translator, media trainer with Sounds Right, jazz musician and reviewer.

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of VIENNA THE INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL by Angus Robertson

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of SIMENON. THE MAN, THE BOOKS, THE FILMS by Barry Forshaw

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of LITTLE DRUMMER by Kjell Ola Dahl

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of DARK MUSIC by David Lagencrantz

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of INVOLUNTARY WITNESS, REASONABLE DOUBTS, A FINE LINE, THE COLD SUMMER and THE MEASURE OF TIME by Gianrico Carofiglio

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of RICCARDINO by Andrea Camilleri

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of THE PEOPLE OPPOSITE by Georges Simenon

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of VANDA by Marion Brunet

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of RED IS MY HEART by Antoine Laurain and Le Sonneur

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of SILVER PEBBLES by Hansjörg Schneider

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of THE JUST: HOW SIX UNLIKELY HEROES SAVED THOUSANDS OF JEWS FROM THE HOLOCAUST by Jan Brokken

Read Max Easterman’s #RivetingReview of CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT: THE STRANGE AND EPIC STORY OF MODERN ROMANIA by Paul Kenyon