"The Flanders Panel" by Arturo Perez-Reverte

 

A murder mystery set in the art world in Madrid. With a large dose of chess.

Julia is an art restorer working on a Flemish painting showing two men playing chess as a woman at a window reads. An X-ray of the painting reveals a hidden inscription: who killed the knight? She consults her ex-lover Álvaro, an art historian, the woman who is arranging the sale of the painting Menchu, her 'guardian', the gloriously camp César, an antique dealer, and shabby down at heal chess genius Muñoz. They start investigating the painting. Then Álvaro is found dead.

By reverse-playing the game shown on the painting, Muñoz works out who captured the knight. This part of the mystery is solved by the 50% turning point. Then Julia keeps finding cards with chess moves written on them and she realises that Álvaro's killer is playing the game (as black) on from the position shown in the painting and that more deaths must occur before either white or black's king is check-mated. The murder mystery must be solved before Julia, the white queen, becomes another victim.

I love this sort of murder mystery with added historical puzzles and it was a classic example of its kind. The chess problems were explained so even a layman like myself was able to understand. But I expected more than I received. I was disappointed that the characters were such stereotypes: all the art world people were elegant and cultured and bitchy and the others included a dumb gigolo, a stupid policeman and the chess expert who was the classic private investigating loner in his shabby dress and his diffident manner. It was also disappointing that the historical mystery was solved in the first half, and so easily. There was a certain amount of what felt like padding in the middle as the characters talked of chess in Freudian terms and considered layers of meaning in terms of chess, and Bach (the owner of the painting was, wouldn't you know, an ex-conductor), and recursiveness: the influence of Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter was acknowledged in the epigraphs to chapters 9 and 11. 

A fun murder mystery but I was expecting more.

Selected quotes:

• “Life is like an expensive restaurant where, sooner or later, someone always hands you the bill, which is not to say that you should deny the joy and pleasure afforded by the dishes already eaten.” (Ch 1)
• “He had the unmistakable air of someone defeated before the battle has even started, of someone who, when he opens his eyes each morning, awakens only to failure.” (Ch 8)
• “Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father.” (Ch 9)
• “An exception doesn't prove anything; it invalidates or destroys any rule. That's why you have to be very careful with inductive reasoning.” (Ch 11)
• “In all businesses, unimpeachable honesty is the surest route to death from starvation.” (Ch 15)

July 2025; 295 pages

First published in Madrid by Alfaguara SA in 1990

My edition, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, was published by Harper Collins in 1994

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Detailed summary of the plot: spoiler alert

Julia is an art restorer restoring a picture of two men playing chess as a woman watches. X-rays show a hidden inscription, in Latin: Quis necavit equitem: Who killed the knight? 

She goes to see art historian (and ex-lover) Álvaro; he identifies the people in the picture and points out that one was already dead. Art dealer Menchu tries to negotiate herself a larger percentage of the sale on the basis that this discovery will increase the value of the painting. She and Julia, with Julia's ex-guardian César, are trying to work out who killed the knight and waiting for Álvaro but he sends documents instead.

César and Julia go to a chess club and recruit expert player Muñoz who proposes to play the game shown in the painting backwards to discover who captured the white knight.

The police interview Julia in connection with Álvaro's death. Was it accident? But he died before he sent the documents. Suspicious!

César gives Julia a gun to defend herself.

Muñoz solves the mystery of who killed the knight. But now Julia discovers a card giving a further move and she and Muñoz realise that the game is now being played forward and that 'capturing'; a piece means a murder. And Julia, the white queen, is under threat. And she seems to be followed by a blue Ford.

While she is at the antique market, Julia's car is tampered with and another card is left. She and César see the blue Ford and attack it, Julia with the pistol. It’s the police. They have been tailing her 

The card Julia found has further moves in the game which they analyse with Muñoz.

Menchu has got wasted in a night club. Julia collects her in a taxi and takes her back to her flat. Next morning Julia goes out and while she is away from the flat, Menchu is murdered (there's another card left by the body, with yet further moves) and the painting stolen. 

The police arrest Menchu's boyfriend, gigolo Max, who tells Julia that Menchu planned to steal the painting but it was obviously taken by the man who murdered her.

Julia is working late in the restoration area of the Prado when she gets a phone call telling her to go to Room 12 and look at the painting by Brueghel the Elder called The Triumph of Death. There’s another card with more moves.

Julia and Muñoz go to confront the murderer. Muñoz plays against the murderer to the end of the game; he wins. The murderer explains how (and why) the crimes were committed. 

"La Vida del Buscon" (The Swindler) by Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas

 The father of Pablos is a thief, his mother is a witch, his uncle is a hangman. He becomes the servant of Don Diego, a young gentleman, accompanying him to boarding school where he goes hungry. Eventually he becomes a rogue, making money using any tricks he can: including theft, beggary, and card-sharping. 

This is a classic picaresque, set in 1600s Spain. It is knockabout stuff, frequently scatological, which reminded me of the crude humour of the Carry On films, but without their subtlety and euphemisms. There is no character development, unless you count the gradual learning of new tricks. It presumably provides an insight into the society of that place and time (clothes, frequently threadbare, play an important part and everyone is on the make; he spends some time in prison and the author was at one time a governor of a prison so he must have known what he was talking about) but many of the jokes are too obvious to be very funny and in the end I grew a little weary. The ending is abrupt, as if the author ran out of things to say.

But it had its moments:

• "You are well aware of the price of this book, as you have already bought it, unless you are looking through it in the bookshop, a practice which is very tiresome for the bookseller and ought to be suppressed with the utmost rigour of the law." (To the Reader)
• "They brought in little bowls of a soup so clear that if Narcissus had drunk it he would have fallen in quicker than into the pool." (1.3)
• "I had no right to take anything more out of the house than my shadow." (1.8)

April 2021, 131 pages

This review was written by 
the author of Motherdarling

"Two middle-aged ladies in Andalusia" by Penelope Chetwode

Nowadays a tale of someone's holiday might be broadcast if the someone was a celebrity and TV schedules needed filling. In 1961 it seems that John Betjeman's wife counted as a celebrity and that therefore she could have her travelogue published.

She is one of the middle-aged ladies, the other being her horse. She embarks on a riding tour in the rugged mountains of Andalusia north of Granada. Her passions are the countryside, which must be beautiful, and the Catholic church: she attends at least one Mass every day. Almost every page was filled with her approval of Catholicism. She hates the Spanish communists because they gutted churches and she approvingly quotes a Franco fan (because Franco allegedly "never took a big decision without spending the night in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament" (Nov 27). She believes that the poor Spanish children she sees are happier and will be happier than the mass-educated relatively less poor English children back home: "Will our girls make such efficient and therefore contented wives and mothers as their Spanish counterparts who to-day can not only read and write ... but have a good knowledge of Christian doctrine and can sew and wash and iron quite beautifully?" (Dec 1). The modern world, in her eyes, is bad and the old ways almost inevitably better and decidedly more beautiful. All in all this book suggests a tremendous sense of complacent entitlement; she is almost the epitome of the benevolent (in their own minds) and patronising feudal lord.

The book is chiefly interesting for its depiction of rural life in Franco's Spain:

• "He was a day labourer: yesterday no man had hired him but to-day somebody had." (Nov 6)
• "When you are still in the elementary stages of learning a language your only hope is to talk yourself, to prevent people talking to you, as they are sure to introduce tenses with which you are not yet familiar." (Nov 8)
• "Two huge pigs ... nosed me so lovingly, so trustingly, and soon their great intestines would be lying in heaps in the kitchen waiting to be filled with pudding mixture" (Nov 20)
• "An oddly assorted mixed grill with little bits of tough steak, lumps of pork fat, three fired fresh sardines, a grilled thrush and some chips, all on the same plate." (Nov 20)

December 2018; 153 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Links to other books on travel, exploration and explorers, reviewed in this blog can be found here.

"How I got into art school (and out of prison)" by William McLellan

This book also seems to be published under the title Wild Ride to Freedom.

There's not a lot about art school. This is a memoir of prison life in Franco's Spain. Because he wanted to be an artist but couldn't afford to go to art school, McLellan decided to spend a year in Morocco drawing, funding it by selling LSD tabs smuggled from England (these were the sixties). The route lay through Franco's Spain. Although McLellan's drugs weren't found, he was arrested for joy riding, badly beaten up for trying to escape (he assaulted a guard in the attempt) and thrown into Modelo prison to await trial. This is the story of the mediaeval grimness of the prison and the friends who helped him survive. Prison also allowed him to remember his dreadful childhood. Finally he finds salvation through art: he ends up forging antiques in the prison workshop for the authorities to sell to tourists.

It is an extraordinary story and it is well written with a very clear structure . The childhood reminiscences are interspersed with prison scenes in a carefully measured way so you never get too much of either. The descriptions of prison life are matter of fact and it is the material itself that makes them gripping. I was hooked.

Brilliant descriptions:

• "Sylvie had cried so much that I could taste the salt on her wet face." (p 38) Nevertheless, the dumped girlfriend is the only person to visit him in his more than six months in prison.
• “I waited in a wilderness of time until a distant commotion roused me.” (p 54)
• “His fingers ... were short, stubby and grubby, with almost non-existent nails - just little strips with the fingertips curling over them like mushrooms.” (p 134)
• “Men dressed completely in white pummelled pastry with such force that their tall white hats waved around the room like mushrooms in a hurricane.” (p 268) 

Hippy prison philosophy:

• “Dope will get you through times of no money, better than money will get you through times of no dope.” (p 102)
• “Don't give up on the past - it forms the present.” (p 243)
• “By splitting things into boxes to classify them, the free-flowing unity of the world had been broken up and man had separated himself from it ... Animals didn't have words so they fitted into nature without thinking about it, but we saw ourselves as above nature and tried to control it. That's what words were used for - control.” (p 283)
• “I can do anything. There are no rules for me, only horizons.” (p 285)
• “Life is like a shit sandwich - the more bread you've got, the less shit you have to eat.” (p 332)
• “That's when you’re truly happy. When you forget to eat!” (p 359)

There were things that helped me understand about art and artists:

• “The clean white page of my book invited me to plunge into it like a pool.” (p 122)
• “I'd decided ... never to make a guide sketch in pencil so I'd have freedom to draw whatever came into my head. It meant I had to incorporate any mistakes into the design, but it was worth it.” (p 122)
• “The subtle gradations in a tone ... were almost photographic.” (p 124)
• “I wanted the curve of the sugar bag to bulge with the weight of its contents.” (p 228)
• “I sort of knew what the yin-yang sign meant. The two fish shapes showed how the opposite sides of life flow together, meaning you couldn't have one without the other. Opposites worked that way in drawing too. You couldn't make something look bright unless you put something dark behind it.” (p 300)

And there were brilliant insights into the life of a poor and poorly parented child:

• “My dream was about the huge scissors cutting open the past, releasing the memories that are hidden for years.” (p 307)
• “I didn't like the wheezy way he breathed when he did it, or the long,cleaning up of the Vaseline.” (p 310)
• “Mum didn't work, but the place was always so filthy that none of us brought our school friends back. Sometimes I'd wash the dried-up porridge from the breakfast bowls and tidy up the room. I’d always leave a note on the tablecloth that said: The fairies have been.” (p 362)
• “I crept into the cold bed and curled up like a question mark so the sheets wouldn't stick to the blood.” (p 365)

A brilliant book. August 2018; 450 pages

Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Spain 1469 - 1714" by Henry Kamen

Spain was unified under the joint monarchy of Ferdinand of Aragon and devout Isabel of Castille. Their rule was so unified that everything was officially done jointly, even if they were apart: one day it was reported that "the king and queen ... gave birth to a daughter". The secret of their monarchy was that they travelled ceaselessly: their mediaeval style of monarchy depended upon the visibility of the monarch(s). In their annus mirabilis of 1492 they completed the Christian reconquest of the peninsula by capturing Granada, they expelled the Jews, and Columbus discovered America on their behalf.

But their only surviving daughter, Juana, had married a Habsburg and was mentally unstable. On the death of her husband she went completely bonkers. So the throne passed to her 17 year old son Charles who was also Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Naples and the Netherlands. With Spanish America, Spain was now a super-power, although one whose empire was inherited rather than deserved. The heartland of Castille was simply not rich enough to sustain the imperial demands. Gold and Silver from the Americas helped Charles balance the books but a financial disaster was waiting to happen.

When Charles' son Philip (who had once been married to Mary of England) became king he immediately restructured his debts. Although he no longer ruled the Holy Roman Empire, which had been passed to Charles' brother, Philip still ruled the Netherlands which now revolted. The costs of fighting this rebellion spiralled. Despite adding Portugal to his realm (another dynastic inheritance although one he had t, briefly, fight for) Philip went bankrupt. More than once. The destruction of the Spanish Armada didn't help.

Financial instability continued under his heirs; the country continued to decline. The last Habsburg king was the victim of genetic in-breeding: his jaw protruded so much that he found it difficult to eat and he was probably infertile and possibly impotent. He had no legitimate heirs of his own body so he bequeathed the throne to the French Dauphin and so started the War of Spanish Succession. This ended with the loss of most of the rest of Spain's European possessions so the new Bourbon dynasty was able to concentrate on rebuilding the land.

Thus a patchwork of mediaeval states became an accidental empire which declined into a nation state. This fascinating tale rarely flags. There is so much of interest; much is relevant today. The concept of convivienza, for example, in which Spanish Moors and Jews coexisted with the Catholic population was replaced with the racist limpieza de sangre (cleanliness of blood); even converted Moslems and Jews were persecuted. The medieval monarchy was based upon personal rule but the Hapsburg Empire had to develop bureaucratic and ministerial rule. And a country receiving previously unheard of wealth from the New World plunged into debt and inflation.

A wonderful tale, well told. August 2013; 275 pages