Stephen Hayes reviewed The blind man of Seville by Robert Wilson
None
4 stars
A crime novel set in Spain.
Unlike some crime novels set in non-English-speaking countries, this one was not written in Spanish and then translated, but appears to have been written in English from the start, though it has quite a lot of Spanish words and phrases in it. The author has an English name, but his bio says nothing about where he was born or where he lives, or whether he lives or has lived in Spain.
The story grows more interesting and compelling as one gets into it. [a:Robert Wilson|2819300|Robert Wilson|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1355821485p2/2819300.jpg] uses a technique used successfully by [a:Robert Goddard|16246|Robert Goddard|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1238359023p2/16246.jpg], where the solution to a current mystery is to be found in the past, and that sort of thing always appeals to the historian in me.
About halfway through I began to wonder if this was going to be a book that went beyond the average whodunit, and might …
A crime novel set in Spain.
Unlike some crime novels set in non-English-speaking countries, this one was not written in Spanish and then translated, but appears to have been written in English from the start, though it has quite a lot of Spanish words and phrases in it. The author has an English name, but his bio says nothing about where he was born or where he lives, or whether he lives or has lived in Spain.
The story grows more interesting and compelling as one gets into it. [a:Robert Wilson|2819300|Robert Wilson|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1355821485p2/2819300.jpg] uses a technique used successfully by [a:Robert Goddard|16246|Robert Goddard|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1238359023p2/16246.jpg], where the solution to a current mystery is to be found in the past, and that sort of thing always appeals to the historian in me.
About halfway through I began to wonder if this was going to be a book that went beyond the average whodunit, and might say something significant about the human condition, perhaps a 21st century version of [b:Crime and punishment|7144|Crime and Punishment|Fyodor Dostoyevsky|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1382846449s/7144.jpg|3393917]. They quote from [a:Albert Camus|957894|Albert Camus|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1416756630p2/957894.jpg]'s novel [b:The outsider|231804|The Outsiders|S.E. Hinton|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1442129426s/231804.jpg|1426690].
One of the historical characters writes in his diary, in 1952
It is an irony not lost on me that here we are in Tangier, captives of the International Zone of Morocco, in the cockpit of Africa, where a new kind of society is being created. A society in which there are no codes. The ruling committee of naturally suspicious European countries has created a permissible chaos in which a new grade of humanity is emerging. One that does not adhere to the usual laws of community but seeks only to satisfy the demands of self. The untaxed unruled business affairs of the International Zone are played out in its society's shunning of any form of morality. We are a microcosm of the future of the modern world, a culture in a Petri dish in the laboratory of human growth. Nobody will say, 'Oh, Tangier, those were the days,' because we will all be in our own Tangier. That is what we have been fighting like dogs for, all over the world, for the last four decades.
The corruption in business and government is what we see every day, and the newspapers are full of it. It is life as we know it, and the art in the writing is to reveal it to us.
Unfortunately he goes and spoils it all on the very next page by using the word "parameters" in a way in which no one would have used it in 1952. Well, perhaps they might have used it in Spanish, though not in English. It is too late even to think about that. The cord suspending disbelief is broken and it comes crashing to the ground.
No, Dostoevsky it isn't, but it's still an above-average whodunit.
