Havana Blue Book

What does crime look like on a tropical island isolated for two generations from its nearest neighbor, laboring under an authoritarian gerontocracy? Surprisingly (and, perhaps, disappointingly), it looks much like crime in that much richer, less tropical neighbor. This is the state of things in Havana Blue, the first installment in Cuban mystery writer Leonardo Padura's now-famous Mario Conde detective series.

Conde, a lieutenant in Havana's police force, is called on to track down Rafael Morin, a wheel in the Ministry of Industry who's turned up missing on New Year's Eve. Conde and Morin grew up together, and Conde grew to resent Morin for (a) being nakedly ambitious, and (b) swiping and marrying Tamara, Conde's high-school crush. You already know where this is going: in digging through Morin's affairs, Conde also digs through his memories of his youth and his lingering feelings for Tamara. Naturally, all is not what it seems to be.

Conde is a vividly realized character. We're immersed in his thoughts, feelings and memories (including copious first-person flashbacks) from page one. However, he's also a type. He has a drinking problem, still hangs out with bros he grew up with, and (like many of his literary ilk) doesn't seem to be able to hold together a relationship with a woman for any length of time. He grumbles about his superiors and takes advantage of Manuel Palacios, his long-suffering detective sergeant. Does all this sound familiar? Of course it does -- Conde is a Cuban Inspector Morse, except he listens to jazz (natch) instead of opera and does occasionally get laid. Still, he's an earthy, relatively okay guy to hang around with.

And that's what you'll be doing: hanging around. Conde spends a great deal of time eating or drinking with old friends. The cross-talk feels real and unforced, full of the kinds of jibes that people throw around when they've known each other for too long. Which is fine as far as it goes, but it usually doesn't have much to do with the case.

Indeed, the case is mostly something that interrupts Conde's socializing and philosophizing. The boss occasionally nudges him to get on with it, but otherwise there's little urgency displayed by anyone connected with the investigation. The only one who seems more than passingly concerned is Tamara, and then only to a certain point. Perhaps this is a byproduct of the setting: it's the tropics, and an island, and nobody's going anywhere very fast because there simply aren't that many places to go.

If so, that's the largest contribution the setting makes to the story. The island's peculiar politics play very little role in anything any of the characters do. The author drops place names regularly and you could follow Conde's travels with a good map of Havana, but unless you've been there you'll end up with only a hazy idea of what these places look like. You won't find the Cuban answer to Donna Leon's Venice or Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana here. This is for me the book's greatest disappointment: change the place names, cut down on people calling each other "comrade," and the story could just as easily be set in any other poverty-stricken, semi-corrupt tropical locale... Miami, perhaps.

I have to wonder if the translation is part of the problem. It's a UK production, and at times the prose feels clunky, but not in any consistent way that would indicate an underlying flaw in the original. Also, it's an exercise in cognitive dissonance to have these Cuban characters speaking like working-class Brits, something I never quite got over.

Havana Blue isn't a bad story; it's a very ordinary one, steeped in all the detective-story tropes that have become so familiar. It could be that I missed the point since I'm a gringo; perhaps Padura is writing in code, and Conde's rambles and flashbacks will bring knowing nods from a home-grown audience ("Ah, yes, it was just that way back then..."). Don't pick this up if you expect a Havana travelogue, or a twisty plot, or a lot of excitement. If you want to spend some downtime with Mario Conde and his crew, pounding Cuban rum while listening to vintage jazz or The Mamas and the Papas, then dive right in.