Memoria, deambulacion urbana y pesquisas en la novela negra de Francisco Gonzalez Ledesama

Abstract

Francisco González Ledesma (1927-2015) has been considered by the critics as one of the most prominent driving forces of contemporary Spanish detective fiction. His first novel, Sombras Viejas, was banned by Franco’s rigid censorship. It was until 1984 that González Ledesma received the Premio Planeta for the novel Crónica sentimental en rojo, which supposed a notable popularity in the field of detective narrative. With the publication of 10 novels and 1 collection of short stories, González Ledesma has created the crime series featured by the Inspector Ricardo Méndez and set mainly in the city of Barcelona. In this series, Méndez is portrayed as a detective of the hard-boiled school who is skeptical about the standard justice, but truly believes in the justice of streets, and a character showing his profound nostalgia for the past of Barcelona as well as his worries of spatial transformations as the consequences of urban planning carried out over the years. In the present essay, we analyze how González Ledesma employs the structures of novel of memory and the novela negra in Crónica sentimental en rojo (A Bloody, Sentimental Story, 1984), Cinco mujeres y media (Five and a Half Women, 2005) and Una novela de barrio (A Neighborhood Story, 2007) which we have selected as representative texts of the Méndez series. Furthermore, we explore how Méndez, an aged, disillusioned, and compassionate police inspector, with a gaze of flâneur, strolls through the streets of the marginal areas of Barcelona, observing the effects of modernity and globalization reflected in the city, and attempts to reconstruct the loss of identity and the collective memory of Barcelona.