His Mariana de Marco detective novels achieved success for a dark and demanding author.
‘Una gota de afecto,’ José María Guelbenzu's last novel (Siruela, 2025), announced almost explicitly that with this novel the writer was saying goodbye to his readers, although without seeking reconciliation or complacency. The atmosphere of the prose, poetic and deliberately anachronistic, the almost gothic landscape, the characters stuck in an enclosed space, the festering and claustrophobic families...
In Guelbenzu's final pages, the character that readers could have identified with the writer (by age, professional career and social class) was revealed as an orphan, begging for affection, headed for the self-destruction of desire. A few months after the publication of that book, Guelbenzu died at the age of 81.
