Russell James has been named “the Godfather of Noir” by Ian Rankin. Russell writes crime novels - about criminals and victims, not the cozy procedural or whodunnit. He is the editor of Great British Fictional Detectives.
How many Uruguayan crime novels have you read? Me neither. Yet among her several literary prizes Mercedes Rosende won the LiBeraturpreis in Germany for this one in 2019.
It takes a while to become, as billed on the cover, ‘a blackly comic caper’ partly because it’s a multi-stream story combining several narratives. First we have Diego, a not too competent kidnapper who, to his surprise, is sprung from remand because the plaintiff says she has never met him. She, Ursula, is slim, rich and sly and shares a name with another, overweight and unhappy Ursula involved in the kidnapping – this Ursula (who has her own narrative stream) being an amateur criminal whose life has been marred by a dominating father. Diego’s dubious lawyer, Antinucci, decides the best thing for his client to do on release is to join up with ‘the Hobo’ (probably the nastiest person in the book) and hold up an armoured truck, a scheme which, as you can imagine, is unlikely to succeed. Piecing all this together (and with her own narrative stream) is the hard-working cop, Captain Leonilda Lima, so far passed over in her career but – who knows? – about to change her luck?
Yes, you could say that this is complicated.
The drama unfolds in a light conversational style, with plenty of asides to the reader, some gags, and plenty of twists and plot reversals. Things do not go well.
Editor’s note: Translated into English by Tim Gutteridge
