The First Prehistoric Serial Killer And Other Stories, by Teresa Solana

One of the thrills of reading good mystery novels (and, as in this case, good short story compilations) is the way that they demonstrate the author’s awareness of a particular location and what its culture and history and geography offer when it comes to crime fiction.  And it so happens that this author is Barcelona’s Best-selling crime writer, which means we get a lot of insight about the complexities of Catalan society as it relates to general shadiness.  If that was the only thing this offered, this book would be good enough, but the author manages to write with a great deal of wit and verve and has a keen grasp of characters who are continually forced to deal with the unexpected.  As an added bonus, not only do we get an enjoyable set of stories, many of which deal with Barcelona, but some of them are connected as well in interesting ways relating to the same set of crimes and characters that really fill out the world of the author nice and would likely make for a worthwhile contemporary Barcelona noir film with highly entertaining elements thrown into the general murder and mayhem that goes on.

The stories offer some surprises.  The first five stories are labeled as Blood, Guts, and Love.  We begin with “The First Prehistoric Serial Killer,” which looks at a detective dealing with a series of connected murders related to troglodyte feminist theory relating to sexuality.  Then comes “The Son-In-Law,” which deals with the attempt to disguise the murder of a wife-beating relative.  After that comes my favorite story of the book, “Still Life No. 41,” where a murdered artist’s own body is seen by mistake by an art museum as an exhibit, at least until it starts to decay.  “Happy Families” tells the story of class-prejudiced ghosts who haunt a family mansion, and “I’m A Vampire,” looks at the humorous and unexpected consequences of ill-timed comparison of someone to a vampire when someone is worried about competition and the suffering his human friends are dealing with.  The rest of the stories are call connected to a set of hits in Barcelona.  “Flesh-Colored People,” which deals with a Chinese-Catalan murder witness, “The Second Mrs. Appleton,” which looks at a British consul and his second wife and their mutual and successful efforts to off each other, “Paradise Gained,” “Mansion With Sea Views,” “I Detest Mozart,” “Birds Of A Feather,” “Barcelona Mon Amour,” and “But There Was Another Solution,” all of which deal with a small and interrelated set of people, and where are a surprisingly large number of dead bodies.

Again, there are a couple of elements that make this collection of stories particularly worthwhile.  For one, the stories themselves shine, as the author shows herself very aware of the need to have distinct and entertaining personalities and plots to drive the reader’s interest.  Here the author manages to summon a diverse set of characters who the reader cares about and put them in crazy plots that don’t have any wasted words and that reach unexpected conclusions.  The other real star of this selection of stories is the city of Barcelona itself and its surrounding areas.  The author shows a deft touch with the political and cultural realities of Catalan life in the Barcelona area, and a skill in turning the complexity of the Catalan situation in Spain into a series of stories that demonstrate the violence and snobbery and corruption just underneath the surface in aa way that makes the mossos, the local police system, appear more than usually incompetent in understanding, much less solving, the violence that is in their midst.