Yesterday I finished reading the sixth of Ben Pastor’s Martin Bora detective novels, THE HORSEMAN’S SONG. I wanted to highlight this one because it might interest some of you. It’s a ‘flashback’ novel, set three years before the beginning of WWII, the setting of the rest of the novels in the series, with a younger Bora as a volunteer for the Nationalists and assigned to Teruel. It’s also the only one of the novels so far where a historical figure plays a major part in the novel. In this case the crime Bora is solving is that of the murder of Federico García Lorca, which in a fictional flight of fancy, takes place in Teruel, not, as history would have it, in Granada. There’s lots of expected homophobia amongst the characters — the homosexuals murdered in the novel are shot in the crotch — there’s a doubling with Bora on one side and a world-weary American counterpart  — Phillip Walton —  on the other. They’re structural opposites: Bora a German Baron from Leipzig, Phillip a working class, world weary roué from Eden, Vermont; both in thrall of the same woman, Remedios. One can see why this would interest Fredric Jameson enough to write on it*: two idealists trying to battle for a utopian ideal but landing on different sides (one of the things that makes this series so interesting is that the hero is a German but not Nazi officer, who has nonetheless sworn fealty to Hitler). There’s also a very good depiction Teruel becoming ‘Teruel’, and a really interesting use of Lorca’s poetry throughout (it’s where the novel gets its title). It also features quite a lot of steamy if tactful sex scenes from Bora’s point of view — thus Maria Verbena Volpi, writing as Ben Pastor, creating a male point of view on sex with a woman. I found it all really interesting, and all his books are page-turners. I’ve clearly been obsessed. It’s been almost six of these novels in the last week.

. The photograph illustrating THE HORSEMAN’S SONG is a very famous one by another mythic figure — Robert Capa.

*Fredric Jameson, ‘War as a Rhizome: Fredric Jameson on Ben Pastor’s Martin Bora Novels’, London Review of Books, vol 44, no. 15, 4 August 2022, pp. 15-18

If you speak Spanish, an excellent discussion of Lorca’s death featuring Lorca’s biographer  Ian Gibson may be seen here and is very interesting to compare to the novel’s plot:

José Arroyo