Author: Jordi Sierra i Fabra
- Fiction
- Debolsillo
- ISBN: 9788490623879
- Release Date: 02-05-2015
-Reviewed by: Eduardo de Lamadrid
Seis días de diciembre is the fifth novel in the Inspector Mascarell series by the prolific Spanish author Jordi Sierra i Fabra, the first four being Cuatro días de enero, Siete días de julio, Cinco días de octubre, and Dos días de mayo. The novel can be read independently without making recourse to the previous entries.
As the title suggests, the action of Seis días de diciembre covers six days from Sunday the 4th to Friday the 9th of December in 1949 and takes place in Barcelona.
Before the Spanish Civil War, Agustino Ponce, better known as “Lenin”, was already a notorious pickpocket and street thief in Barcelona, and Miquel Mascarell, Police Inspector of the Republic, had put him behind bars on several occasions. After the victory of Franco’s forces, roles changed, and the ex-Officer of the Law found himself in the same prison cell as the thief, where the latter helped him to survive. By 1949, Lenin is still plying his crooked trade and even though Mascarell is no longer a policeman, Lenin does not hesitate to seek out his former opponent when he finds himself in danger. As he has done many times before, Lenin decides to lift the briefcase of a well-dressed and elegant man, but all he finds inside the briefcase is a document with the appearance of a catalog, a calling card with the man’s name and the key to a room in Hotel Ritz. Lenin makes contact with his victim and offers to return the briefcase in exchange for a modest reward, and they agree to meet the next day. But everything becomes complicated when the mysterious man fails to show up at the rendezvous, and a corpse is found at the Ritz.
Lenin now senses that he is danger, and that the documents in the briefcase have an importance that he cannot identify or imagine. So he turns for Mascarell for help. Because of his indebtedness, because of his humanism and ethical stance, because of his partiality to losers, Mascarell decides to help Lenin and begins to investigate the case.
Turning over clue by clue in the classic detective novel manner, Mascarell discovers that the documents were in fact a catalog of paintings stolen by the Nazis during WWII, and probably written in Hitler’s own hand. The murdered man turns out to be an Englishman, a member of the Monuments Men dedicated to the recovery of the stolen cultural patrimony. And behind the murder, and subsequent surveillance, beatings, and deaths, are powerful and dangerous players: an escaped Nazi in possession of the stolen paintings, and an unscrupulous entrepreneur and art collector, in cahoots with a corrupt police inspector, who is, in fact, Mascarell’s nemesis.
With his dogged and methodical pursuit, and with the help of the murdered man’s fiancé, a red-haired beauty of uncommon decision and determination, Mascarell manages to survive and recover the stolen goods.
Seis días de diciembre is a powerful story that will not disappoint lovers of intrigue. This is a high voltage noir thriller, with plucky characters, agile prose and detailed descriptions. It offers an excellent recreation of defeated, postwar Barcelona, its lights and shadows, its nooks and recesses, its miseries and illusions.
The novel thus gains richness by reflecting on existential collateral within the contrivances required by the detective novel. For example, the novel identifies art as one more victim of war with its conversion into an object of illegal trafficking and decontextualization and reduction to mere money, stripped of all cultural ontent.
While the subject of the recovery of art treasures stolen by the Nazis is very topical, as is the subject of the Monuments Men, given the release of an eponymous film in 2014, the inclusion of artists such as Kandinsky, Klee, and Picasso in Hitler’s own personal catalog fails to convince, as it is well-known that Hitler considered these artists, and indeed all modern art, to be degenerate.
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