Leonardo Padura is the internationally acclaimed author of several novels including the Havana Quartet, a series of detective stories featuring police inspector Mario Conde, who has been called “a tropical Marlowe.”
Havana Red, Havana Black, and, most recently, Havana Blue, have made their way onto our shelves. The fourth title, Havana Yellow, is expected next year.
Padura describes his books as detective stories with “social character” growing out of his need to “leave behind a mark of an historical moment that we lived through in Cuba and, more specifically, the feeling of disillusionment when the ideal world which they spoke of began to disappear.” Therefore, “they are also sad.”
In a later Conde story, Adios, Hemingway – which was actually published here before the Quartet titles – he is retired from the police.
His new occupation is buying and selling old books which allows him to be, as the character himself explains, “closer to literature but not too far from the street.”
However, when the skeletal remains of a man killed on Papa’s Cuban estate 40 years earlier are unearthed, the police ask Conde – well known for his Hemingway obsession – to help with the case.
“Hemingway was my first great literary influence,” says Padura, “he deceived me twice: the first time he made me believe that to write like him was easy; the second time he made me believe that a writer’s lifestyle was that much fun”.
