#RivetingReviews: Michael Eaude reviews BLACK STORMS by Teresa Solana

The Posh, Left-wing Policewoman

Teresa Solana’s crime novel Black Storms is structured round three families. Her central character, 38-year-old Police Deputy-Inspector Norma Forester, lives in an enormous modernista flat in a classy area of Barcelona. Her eccentric family consists of four generations of women. Grandmother Senta, aged 90, was widowed seventy years earlier (the novel is set in 2009) by the execution of her International Brigade lover Jack Forester at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. Then there’s Norma’s mother Mimí, who ever loyal to the hippy aesthetics of her youth, still wore her hair long and dyed orange. Violeta, Norma’s 18-year-old daughter, is a political squatter, who arrives at Norma’s birthday supper in dreads, the piercings, the tattered t-shirt and the filthy jeans typical of her lifestyle and is “radiant” with a new boy-friend. Her mother, she believes, is a member of a police force that is an instrument of oppression. Perhaps Violeta is the only sensible member of this family? As well as the four women, round the table sit Norma’s pathologist husband Octavi, her gay ex-husband, Violeta’s father Guillem, who is also Octavi’s brother, and Robert, Guillem’s latest lover. Rounding off the family is Norma’s Aunt Margarida, a nun but also an internet hacker, who likes to escape the silence of the convent now and again for more than a few drinks and to paint her nails red. Confused? You probably are, but Teresa Solana’s skill is in defining her characters by what they are.

Norma, as she reminds her rebellious daughter, is not the sort of cop who beats up squatters, but a useful cop who hunts murderers. Her police colleagues are the book’s second “family”. Unlike her biological one, the police are hierarchical and quite dysfunctional, with the authoritarian Superintendent Antònia Mistral sneering at Norma whenever she can. Norma and her husband are cruelly summoned from her birthday party with orders from the very top to a murder scene at the university. She finds all the police top brass are present. Even the Minister arrives. It transpires that the elderly professor strangled in his office had married into the upper-class Muntaner family, who must be treated with silk gloves: they are wealthy industrialists.

Norma was called to handle the case because, despite her left-wing views, she’s posh. Indeed, behind her back, police colleagues call her ‘Lady Norma’. She protests that, instead of interrupting her birthday they could have sent Carrasco, but he, though an excellent detective, is too lower-class, too rude and rough. His clothes and thick, dandruffy hair usually stank of bar fry-ups and cheap eau de cologne, and his breath of cheap wine, black tobacco and vile bile. Carrasco is at the bottom of the police hierarchy, but he gets results. Solana happily upends conventional assumptions and satirises the powerful.

The third family is the powerful Muntaner clan, the antithesis of Norma’s family. Solana explained when the novel first came out in Catalan in 2010: I wanted to show two kinds of upper-class families … the Catalans who got rich under Franco and those who maintained a militant rejection of the dictatorship.* While the Muntaner grandfather founded the family fortune under the dictator, Norma’s grandfather was murdered by the Franco regime. The plot ties together the three families in a satisfying conclusion (but not one to be revealed in detail here). The crime is solved and the murderous roots of the Muntaners’ wealth and power are exposed.

Black Storms is sharply anti-capitalist. Norma, cop though she is, does not forget her revolutionary grandfather. Solana wanted to pinpoint the tainted source of much wealth and to highlight the anarchist movement of the 1930s. She said: What it meant has been disparaged and silenced.*

Teresa Solana has won a number of literary prizes with her seven crime novels and two volumes of short stories to date, several translated into English. She is a very original writer, bending the normal boundaries of the crime genre. What delights most is the contradictory strangeness of many of her characters, who are convincingly real though in many instances almost surreal. Black Storms works well as a crime novel, and it’s also humorous and satirical. And proudly and movingly, the novel denounces injustice. The [civil] war’s wounds are not closed, Solana asserts.* The crime in her novel today has its roots back in the Franco regime’s unpunished murders.

Reviewed by Michael Eaude

* Interview in El Periódico, Barcelona (8 September 2010).

BLACK STORMS

Teresa Solana

Translated from Catalan by Peter Bush

Published by Corylus (2024)

December 2024 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

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Michael Eaude was born in London and has lived in Barcelona since 1990. Barcelona, Catalonia and the Catalan-speaking lands have given him the themes for most of the books he’s had published since 2001. His latest books are A People’s History of Catalonia (Pluto, London 2022) and a revised Triunfo en la medianoche del siglo (Renacimiento, Sevilla 2023). More at www.michaeleaude.com.