Leonardo Padura's Top Ten

Leonardo Padura shows here he's Cuban novel Top Ten.




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Latin American Literature

Leonardo Padura: Havana Gold

A few reviews of Leonardo Padura's Havana Gold.

This is the final novel in the English-language version of Padura's Four Seasons series of novels, set in Havana in 1989, although in fact it is the second in the original Spanish. Again we have a murder set against the looming crisis of Cuba's Special Period as the implosion of the Soviet Union starts. And again the disillusioned detective Mario Conde sets out to resolve the crime in his own slow-paced, insightful manner. It is a formula that has worked throughout the four-part series as well as in two other novels, Adios Hemingway and the latest, and by far most sophisticated work in this genre, La neblina del ayer (2005, still untranslated into English). Leonardo Padura's recent presentation at the International Institute for the Study of Cuba will have illustrated the reason for his novels' popularity (now translated into sixteen languages) and his own personal success.

The plot is simple: the body of Lissette Delgado, a young teacher, is found after she has been raped, beaten and strangled. Mario Conde's mission is to find the killer, a challenge that takes him through the crumbling streets of Havana to his old high school, where Lissette taught. The Special Period is on the verge of arriving, along with massive dislocations in Cuban society - and the edgy atmosphere, complete with incipient social problems (drugs were virtually unheard of until this time), growing corruption, and generally demoralized environment, are all superbly presented.

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Like an indulgent parent, Leonardo Padua allows his literary progeny (in this, his fifth outing) free rein to chat up women, argue about books and music, get drunk with friends and express his desires. Indeed, we get to know The Count so well, and become so involved with his arguments about Franny and Zooey (better than The Catcher in The Rye), John Fogerty (the greatest ever voice) and “Strawberry Fields” (The Beatles’ best song), that unravelling the murder becomes almost incidental to the plot.

Havana Gold is a textured treat for those who like their detective fiction served long and lazy with a double shot of rum.

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Havana Gold is the fourth novel in the Havana quartet by Leonardo Padura and once again creates a rich and fascinating portrayal of a crumbling yet vibrant city. Lusty, macho, foul-mouthed and poetic in roughly equal amounts Lieutenant Conde becomes our guide to the faded grandeur of Cuba's stylish yet poverty-stricken capital as he reflects on the changing conditions in the city that he grew up in. Vital and rough-edged, Havana Gold is perhaps best enjoyed with a glass of rum and a cigar.

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Cuban Literature

Interview with Leonardo Padura

Jane Jakeman interviews Leonardo Padura.

Leonardo Padura's prize-winning series of novels about Cuban detective Inspector Mario Conde has changed the face of Latin American crime writing, taking a conventional formula into the category of dark and serious literary fiction. Havana Gold completes his sweeping portrait of Cuban society, seen through the ironic vision of his louche, sensual and intelligent cop. Here, Conde searches for the murderer of a teacher who has been strangled, and the quest takes him back to the school where he studied.

Padura has written of Conde as whispering in the writer's ear, and of the Havana Quartet as a joint decision between character and author. Yet Conde, though he has many consolations in the form of cognac, cigars and occasional sexy women, sometimes suffers from a form of anomie that leaves him in despair. During his visit to London, I ask Padura, a man of warm and lively empathy, whether he and Conde are one and the same. He explains that Conde is a pair of spectacles through which he can observe Havana.

"Conde is fiction, but he has many of my own characteristics," he says. " We belong to the same generation. This is a very important thing in Cuba, because it's the generation that was practically born with the revolution. All my intelligent life happened with the revolution. We grew up in its romantic period – the Sixties and Seventies. I remember in school we had posters that said that the future of humanity belonged completely to the socialists.

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Cuban Literature

Cuban Napkin Fiction

Leonardo Padura wrote Esquire this napkin.

Read the text here.





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Cuban Literature

Interview with Leonardo Padura

An interview with Cuban mistery writer Leonardo Padura.

After years of success across Europe, the detective novels of Cuban author Leonardo Padura Fuentes have finally started to appear in English.
This spring, two novels featuring his charismatic policeman Lieutenant Mario Conde are being published in Britain.
The first, Adios Hemingway (Canongate) has already been critically well received. The second, Havana Red (Bitter Lemon Press) has just been published.
Until Padura began writing detective novels in the early 1990s, the genre in revolutionary Cuba was a medium through which an attempt had been made at using it to inculcate the masses in the correct mode of behaviour in a socialist society.
Borrowing heavily from formulas adopted in the former socialist bloc of eastern Europe, the Cuban genre had some successes, but these were outstanding because they shone amid a mass of mediocrity.
All too often, anodyne policemen chased predictable CIA infiltrators and sympathisers in hackneyed plots that held little suspense.
Then, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the real world that sustained this fictional counterpart disappeared and the way was clear for a revitalisation of the genre.
In stepped Padura with his four novels Las cuatro estaciones (The Four Seasons), all set in 1989, the cataclysmic year in which the Berlin Wall came down.
Just as in 1930s US, when Dashiell Hammett transformed the detective story from the genteel drawing room mysteries that had been popular in the prosperous 1920s into the hard-boiled thrillers more befitting the gangster age, Padura has brought about a similar genre shift in Cuba.
Padura's Lieutentant Conde is a divorcee and a drinker with a heavy sense of irony who tracks down corrupt officials and home-grown crooks in a familiar Havana - of crumbling buildings, street girls and shortages.

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Cuban Literature

Interview with Leonardo Padura

Mario Conde is Cuba's best-known cop. A hard-boiled, hard-drinking, rule-breaking, loose-living police lieutenant who views the world around him through a hungover haze of cynicism and rum, he is no revolutionary role model. The Havana he inhabits, with its nervous transvestites, corrupt ex-officials and moralising newsreaders, is a rough old place. But the cop and his city have no shortage of admirers.
Leonardo Padura, a 50-year-old journalist-turned-author, has recently won his third Premio Hammett (the International Association of Crime Writers award) for his latest Mario Conde novel. And yet, he says, what he is writing now, with its references to misbehaviour and unconventional sexuality, would never have been published in the stricter Cuba in which he grew up.

You can find the review here

Semana Negra de Gijón Prizes

Spanish writers Lorenzo Silva, José Ovejero and José Ángel Mañas and Cuban Leonardo Padura are the four finalists for the International Dashiell Hammett Prize for Novel, that will be announced next July 14th in the XIX the edition of the Semana Negra de Gijón.

The prize for the best crime novel published in Spanish in 2005, where selected Las Vidas Ajenas (Other People's Lives) by José Ovejero; Las neblinas del ayer (The fogs of yesterday) by Leonardo Padura; El caso Karen (The Karen Case) by José Ángel Mañas, and La reina sin espejo (The Queen Without Mirror) by Lorenzo Silva.
For the International Rodolfo Walsh Prize for non-fiction for the best work of criminal subject written in Spanish in 2005, the finalists are the Argentinean Juan Gasparini with La fuga del Brujo (The Flight of the Wizard) and Ignacio Martínez de Pisón's Enterrar a los muertos (To Bury the Dead)

The Memorial Prize Silverio Cañada for best the first black novel written in Spanish where selected Tiempo de Alacranes (Time of the Scorpions) by Mexican Bernardine Fernandez; El manuscrito de Dios (The Manuscript of God) by Juan Biedma; Las neblinas de Almagro by Mexican Eduardo Monteverde and El tiempo escondido (The Hidden Time) by the Spanish Joaquín M. Barrero.

Semana Negra Official Website

Havana Black by Leonardo Padura

Buy Havana Black at Amazon.com

Leonardo Padura's Havana Red introduced the English-speaking world to Lieutenant Mario Conde, who pursued a baroque concept of police work amid the crumbling riches of Havana. Now, his admired boss has been replaced, his Siamese fighting fish is floating belly-up, and Conde has handed in his resignation, locking himself in to die of "rum and cigar-ettes, grief and bitterness".

He is persuaded to interrupt this bout of anomie to take on an intriguing case. A former minister responsible for confiscating pre-revolutionary art-works has been killed. As well as having his head smashed in, the deceased had been castrated. The victim had been living safely in Miami, so why had he returned to a country where he might have many enemies?

Padura's satisfying narrative delves deep into Conde's world and into the stories of his friends and colleagues. Hanging over the book is an oppressive tension; Cuba is waiting for a hurricane. Conde needs to get his story sorted out before the storm hits - not just the crime, but the fictional narrative at which he bangs away on an old typewriter.

You can find the review here

Interview with Leonardo Padura

Leonardo Padura Fuentes is the internationally acclaimed author of several novels including the “Havana Quartet”, a series of detective novels featuring Havana police Inspector Mario Conde. The latest installment, available in English, in that series is Havana Red. Havana Red was awarded the Dashiell Hammett prize for detective fiction in Spain in 2004. Adios Hemingway, the next Mario Conde mystery, is due out this month. Padura lives in Havana, Cuba.

PA: Do you favor the detective/crime fiction genre? If so, why?

LP: I remember that back in 1977, when I wrote the first book review that I had published in a magazine, it was a commentary on a crime novel. Since that time, when I was a liberal arts student at the University of Havana and wasn’t even dreaming of being a fiction writer, I was already very close to the crime novel, dark, detectivesque, or whatever you want to call it, but at the same time I was developing my preferences for the approaches of authors such as Hammett and Chandler. Then, in the 80’s, I was the critic “par excelence” of the Cuban-authored crime novel, and was also sketching out my interests. I did not like the majority of those Cuban crime or spy novels, but what was lacking was “literature,” perhaps because there were too many very obvious political intentions, almost typical of socialist realism. For this reason, back in 1990, when I emerged from a period of six years during which I did practically nothing but journalism—I had written my first novel in 1984, Horse Fever (Fiebre de caballos), a story of love and initiation – I had decided to write a crime novel and I had several objectives. Among these were, it had to be very Cuban, but not resembling those crime novels that I had criticized; that it should be a crime novel, but only in appearance, because I was more interested in the literary aspect than in any kind of mystery; that it should have Hammett and Chandler as models, but also authors who I had been reading in those years, such as Vazques Montalban, Chester Himes, Jean Patrick Manchette and many other non-crime-novel authors.

My decision to write that novel, which I titled Past Perfect (Pasado Perfecto) and which was first published in 1991 had several purposes, but the greatest was that, being a crime novel, it should also be a social novel, because I believe that one of the virtues of this genre is that one can utilize it in any way one wishes, as long as it [does not] violate the known rules of what one is doing. The “dark” novel can take one directly to the darkest corners of a reality, of a society, while always maintaining something that is very important to me: the possibility of communicating with readers. That is why I like the police-type novel so much – I call my novels “false crime novels,” because the crime novel structure is only a pretext to get to other places – and being that I have practiced it so much: of my eight novels, six are police-type, even though I must recognize that my most ambitious book, The Novel of my Life, is a novel of intrigue in which there are no cadavers, even though there are some mysteries.

You can find the full interview here

Crime fiction in Cuba

The genre has pushed its limits, both aesthetically and politically, in the Mario Conde series of Leonardo Padura, Cuba's best known and most popular crime writer. And it has also crossed the language barrier, with bilingual authors in and out of Cuba who pen their books in English and enjoy a broader market than writers who depend on the vicissitudes of translation.
In her 2004 book on Cuban and Mexican crime fiction, Crimes Against the State Crimes Against Persons (University of Minnesota Press, $19.95), Persephone Braham identifies the genre as neopoliciacos. The Spanish policiaco, like the French policier, is the name for what in English goes by "detective" fiction. The difference is telling. Where the English and American genre stresses the private investigator (Sherlock Holmes), Latin countries focus on the policeman (Inspector Maigret), reflecting societies that privilege the individual or the state, respectively. Of course, the attitudes converge in the figure of the maverick cop (Dirty Harry), an important anti-hero role model for societies like Cuba, and to some extent Mexico, that are or have been run by one-party governments intolerant of dissent.
Policiacos from the early years of the Cuban Revolution, according to Braham, were naively schematic, with the policía as the good revolutionary battling the dastardly plots of exiles and the CIA. But two forces pushed the genre in a different direction.

You can find the full article here