At first, the translation of gangster literature to anywhere other than Chicago or New York sounds pretentious. But in the end I always tend to pay attention to the daring, to that creative insolence that in this case leads us to import a distinctly American imaginary to adapt it to Spanish circumstances, with the post-war black market as a comparison with prohibition.
In fact, in Spain there were a lot of criminal organizations of all kinds, perhaps not with that point of sophistication of the Italian emigrants who reached the other side of the ocean, but with the same harshness, when they played. If not, we can consult the same Perez Reverte Who not so long ago gave birth to a famous Falcó contemporary of the characters in this plot.
And this is how we can finally enjoy this novel by Fernando Benzo, well built on the other hand and with high doses of this dark tension that every visit to the underworld awakens. In every underworld, in any age, children who are beginning to cease to be so find their easiest way out in crime. Clean files to stain and energy to burn with the smoke of gunpowder. With easy money as the foundation of everything, yes.
The protagonist of the plot is a guy who launches us on the adventure of his life since he was an underage boy already marked by the blood of his first victim. Only the voices of his conscience prevented him from immersing himself in that Billy the Kid complex that seems to free the lesser criminals. But it was about surviving ...
It all started in the Dixie, a place that emerged from the ashes of Madrid that has already expired where criminals divide the business under the law of the fittest and the guidelines of the corruption of power where characters who also thrived with black businesses settled.
That is where little Emilio met Nico, a relationship that appears at times as a candid childhood friendship only overshadowed by circumstances. Both of them had a lot to learn about the shady businesses of post-war misery, until the critical moment when luck stopped smiling at them and their innocence ended, as the novel points out, cast ashes on the stake in the underworld ...
You can now buy the novel The Ashes of Innocence, the new book by Fernando Benzo, here: