The 3 best books by the intriguing Ernesto Mallo

The reading of Ernesto mallo awakens an endearing paradoxical sensation. Because addressing a resounding and raw noir genre (many times from the other side of the Atlantic), his stories fit perfectly with the imagination of other mythical narrators here, such as Gonzalez Ledesma o Vazquez Montalban. And so the myth of noir in spanish, more classic and with sociological background, it turns green. And hence that point of nostalgia for the defeated worlds still indebted to the most sordid politics, the most merciless hitmen and ruin as a payment currency.

And it is that no matter how miserable the criminals and villains of yesteryear were, their time fascinates when contemplating it suspended between wisps of smoke from official offices. And strangely, that nostalgia is awakened, let's call it that, of an underworld that today moves more underground, perhaps between algorithms and AI.

That's why Mallo offers that endangered authenticity. He alone seems to support the weight of legacies necessary to serve as the shaft of a criminal literature that if it did not drift away from thriller or gore ...

Top 3 recommended novels by Ernesto Mallo

The city of fury

This story takes place in hot, humid and dark streets, conducive to criminals and hitmen, both private and paid by the State. The city sleeps uneasily, it breathes like a dangerous beast that should not be awakened. There is a climate of concentrated rancor, desires for revenge, a dance of evil spirits that hide in the shadows. Stealthy silhouettes spying from their hiding places with phosphorescent eyes.

Beings willing to kill for a jacket or a watch, for any minimal loot that reduces constant hunger. There is hatred in every beat of these soulless streets. The unbearable pressure of silent signals announcing a bloody revolt that can and will break out at any moment is felt.

This novel takes place in Buenos Aires, but could take place in any western city in the near future: the effects of the pandemic and the economic recession have thrown millions of people into poverty, power and money are increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, governments opt for repression; A sharp and accurate writing for a novel that deals with situations that should not occur. With the well-known narrative expertise that characterizes his work, Ernesto Mallo gives us a vibrant dystopia in which no one is innocent and nothing is what it seems.

The city of fury

The conspiracy of the mediocre

Argentine narrative, as well as cinematography, has dealt extensively with the bloody Videla dictatorship. However, it has not treated the immediately preceding period to the same extent.

That stage was the breeding ground in which what would later become large-scale state terrorism was cooked. Under the name of Triple A (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina), a para-police group attacked anyone who dared to oppose the designs of the country's strong man: José López Rega, nicknamed El Brujo for his love of black magic. AND

n this prequel to the series by the detective Perro Lascano, we find a young detective, although already a real investigator. To remove him from the investigation, the police officers commission him to clarify the suicide of an elderly German. That mission will throw him directly into the jaws of the hitmen, in a territory where he cannot count on anyone or trust anyone. In the course of his investigation, Lascano will meet Marisa, with whom he will live an epic love story.

The conspiracy of the mediocre

Crime in the Barrio del Once

Lascano, the Dog, a police commissioner upset by the recent death of his wife, receives a warning: two bodies have appeared near the Riachuelo. But at the scene of the crime he will discover a third body that does not have the characteristics of the "executed" of the time, that of a Jewish moneylender from the Barrio del Once. Investigating the case will not be easy for Lascano.

In this detective novel, with the historical framework of the dictatorship and political violence that Argentina experienced in the 1970s, policemen, soldiers, young people in hiding and members of the upper class make up a plot in which the game of the characters, the richness of descriptions and dialogues reach a memorable narrative power. Ernesto Mallo exhibits an admirable command of the best police tradition when dealing with this subject that he knew first-hand, masterfully maintaining the suspense in a complex story, adjusted to the millimeter and that does not give the reader respite.

Crime in the Barrio del Once

Other recommended books by Ernesto Mallo

The thread of blood

The past can be so cruel as to be infatuated with returning when one begins to be happy. That is what happens to the Lascan Dog. Just when his retirement from the police practice favors the calm of a love that is always badly healed and therefore pending with Eva, the past is presented there, with the aseptic gesture of the postman who leaves a fine in your hands and asks you for an acknowledgment of receipt.

It is true that, on the Dog's part, there is always a predisposition to sift through the trash of pending cases, even if the case ends up being that of his own life. When those days he learns the testimony of a dying criminal who claims to know how his parents were killed, his vocation for the truth, impregnated in this case with a hatred cultivated since his desolate childhood, returns with uncontrollable force.

The Dog moves from the past to the present, from Argentina to Spain, the thread of his truth, of his most transcendental case is a thin thread of blood spilled so many years ago that his trail is confused with any other trail of his own blood, seething with vengeance and rage. The dark feelings awakened in him transform him into that other man incapable of seeing his reality, incapable of being happy with Eva, incapable of closing his eyes and stopping thinking...

The truth does not always set us free. That is what the Lascano Dog may end up understanding. Sometimes it can chain you to that past with acknowledgment of receipt, a past that in its final truth disrupts everything that made him who he is, what built him on his miseries, what covered overlooked details thanks to fiction, perhaps omitted by the deaf conscience that never before wanted to face that truth, finally laid bare in the light of the stories, the testimonies and the evidence.

The thread of blood, by Ernesto Mallo

Old dog

The most noir collection from the Siruela publishing house is not just anything. In its collection we find select works of the noir genre with even sociological and anthropological aspirations. Because in writing about the ominous there is much that has never been told about the human condition. So approaching it as Fred Vargas, Domingo Villar (when he still enlightened us with his works) or Ernesto Mallo, to name some of the authors in the collection, do, ends up being something much more interesting than other authors who are more quickly consumed, almost of offal…

Thus we arrive at this installment of the series by Commissioner Lascano. And we already know that a new case in his hands ends up being a teaching of life among shadows and the few lights that remain.

Admitted to El Hogar, a luxury nursing home, Commissioner Lascano is in his lowest hours: right there a crime has just been committed for which he turns out to be the main suspect and that not even he himself, due to his increasingly frequent mistakes, from memory, he is sure he did not commit the crime.

Even so, Lascano feels the call of duty and agrees to collaborate with the police in an investigation that could very well put him in jail. However, the search for the culprit will reveal that there are many who have more than enough reasons to have eliminated the victim...

This novel parades a unique gallery of characters who question themselves about old age, politics, justice or the lack thereof, and the relationships between power and money. Friendship, desire and lost loves are also present in this particular universe where memories and imagination constantly intermingle to illuminate that fiction that we call memory: we never remember things as they were, we remember them as we are.

5/5 - (29 votes)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.