To the fans of Domingo Villar, his death has caught them this week by absolute surprise. The man from Vigo died suddenly at the age of 51 after suffering a cerebral infarction, leaving the Inspector Leo Caldas, the famous character he brought to life with his words. However, the magic of literature is that both will be alive again every time we open any of their novels.
Domingo Villar’s is one of the most important names in the noir genre in Spanish (and in Galician, since he wrote in both languages), in which he debuted in 2006 with Water eyes. The novel marked the birth of Leo Caldas in fiction and became an instant success, translated into four languages and with more than 500,000 copies sold worldwide. This first case of the inspector begins in a house near the beach, on the Galician coast, where the body of a young saxophonist is discovered who seems to have suffered one of the cruelest tortures in living memory.
They assign the case to inspector Leo Caldas, a solitary and nocturnal man, with a good palate for wines and a better ear for jazz, and his assistant Rafael Estévez, a plain Aragonese lost among Galicians. This unique tandem is in charge of investigating the upper echelons and the underworld of Vigo to discover that double lives, like the best intrigues, always hide unexpected folds.
Eyes of water (Leo Caldas nº 1)
However, his was not a one hit wonder literary and in 2009 Villar showed that readers had forever fallen in love with Leo Caldas’ stories, consolidating the success of the series with a new installment. The beach of the drowned It would be translated into four languages and would also be adapted to the cinema in 2015 by director Gerardo Herrero and actor Carmelo Gómez as the protagonist in a film of the same name that can currently be seen streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
On this occasion, the case to be solved revolves around a drowned sailor on the Galician coast and a silent town. If his hands weren’t tied, Justo Castelo would be another of the sons of the sea who found his grave in the water while he was fishing. Without witnesses or a trace of the deceased’s boat, inspector Leo Caldas immerses himself in the seafaring atmosphere of the town, trying to clarify the crime between men and women who refuse to reveal their suspicions and that, when they decide to speak, they point in an unusual direction.
Besides, Caldas is going through difficult days: his father’s only brother is seriously ill and his radio collaboration on Onda Vigo is becoming unbearable. Neither does the impulsive character of Rafael Estévez, his Aragonese assistant, who doesn’t quite adapt to the inspector’s way of being, make things any easier.
The beach of the drowned (Leo Caldas nº 2)
With the expectation at its highest peak, it would take ten years to find out how the story continued. During the years of silence, the author faced the death of his father and the blockade because, in a world in which writing has become a mass production, as he himself said: his “commitment is not with a deadline but with a story that is worthwhile”. Finally, in 2019 the 712 pages of the last shipwhich would also be his last novel although, at the time of his death, Villar was writing a fourth installment of the misadventures of the Galician inspector.
In the last shipDr. Andrade’s daughter lives in a house painted blue, in a place where the beaches of gentle waves contrast with the bustle of the other shore. There the shellfish gatherers rake the sand, the sailors throw their gear into the water and those who go to work in the city wait on the dock for the arrival of the boat that crosses the Vigo estuary every half hour.
One autumn morning, while the Galician coast is recovering from the ravages of a storm, Inspector Caldas receives a visit from a man alarmed by thein the absence of her daughter, who did not show up for a family meal over the weekend or attend her ceramics class on Monday at the School of Arts and Crafts. And although nothing seems to have altered the house or the life of Mónica Andrade, Leo Caldas will soon verify that, in life as in the sea, the most peaceful of surfaces can hide a dark background of devastating currents.
The last ship (Leo Caldas nº 3)
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Cover photo | siruela