A killer chase through the streets of postwar Madrid has Billy Mann reaching for a stiff drink
By TS Strachan
It's a good trick if you can pull it off. Place your reader straight into the shoes of the protagonist. So, there you are, lounging at a street café in early 1950s Madrid, waiting for your new best friend Rodolfo to arrive, when a total stranger invites himself to sit at your table and proposes an intriguing project. All he wants you to do is bump off some fatcat American general, who is shortly to arrive in the city to pave the way for the establishment of US military bases on Spanish soil. Just as a side issue, there is a massive pay packet attached to the endeavour, and if you don't say yes, you will be forced to return to your native Britain, which is still wallowing in a mood called Postwar Grim. Plus, you will have to "face the music", which in the case of the book's hero and notional killer, Tom Field, are the consequences of writing dodgy cheques. It's a no-brainer.
It's a good trick if you can pull it off. Place your reader straight into the shoes of the protagonist. So, there you are, lounging at a street café in early 1950s Madrid, waiting for your new best friend Rodolfo to arrive, when a total stranger invites himself to sit at your table and proposes an intriguing project. All he wants you to do is bump off some fatcat American general, who is shortly to arrive in the city to pave the way for the establishment of US military bases on Spanish soil. Just as a side issue, there is a massive pay packet attached to the endeavour, and if you don't say yes, you will be forced to return to your native Britain, which is still wallowing in a mood called Postwar Grim. Plus, you will have to "face the music", which in the case of the book's hero and notional killer, Tom Field, are the consequences of writing dodgy cheques. It's a no-brainer.
Much as I would like to, I can't say I have ever been very clued up about postwar(s) Spain and life in the dark corners of the Franco regime. I still don’t know much, but in The Short Weekend some of the details hit home. In T S Strachan’s Madrid you can smell the fear. It's right there, hanging in the air of conspiracy. If there is a sense of place, it is more psychological than physical. Yes, this is Madrid, and it feels like a city emerging from trauma. Yet the mood is the thing. Here we witness Tom Field being jerked around endlessly by his conspirator-assassins. They drive around a lot, slipping envelopes of money back and forth, hammering out the precise methodology of murder they intend to unleash on the visiting Yank when he arrives at the train station. Field pulls a practical joke on his new employees when they foolishly hand him a grenade and ask him if he knows what it is. And always in the background there is Field’s belief that he is constantly being watched and sized up for the task in hand. He visits a local prostitute, Pili, and we sense trouble immediately. He will fall in love with her, won’t he? Or will he be forced to kill her? Can there be a happy ending to this tortured venture?
If it’s cloaks and daggers you are after, there are plenty here. Everywhere you look there are shifty-looking characters, fags hanging from their lips, muttering stuff out of the side of their mouths about overthrow and revolution. And there is an epic chase that will have you spinning this way and that, wondering who is still alive and who is hiding where, and did they have a gun? The word mêlée doesn’t even begin to describe it. It is a quick read, quite visual, as if the story might better have been a movie (in black and white, of course).
But there are some things movies can’t do and one of them comes in a description towards the end, when Field finds himself stranded helpless in a church and face to face with the resident clergyman, Father Ramón: "He had that not unpleasant odour that priests often have."
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