No-one Loves a Policeman by Guillermo Orsi
It is December 2001 and Argentina is in crisis. Pablo Martelli used to be a policeman – not just any policeman, but part of a force now referred to as the National Shame for its role doing horrible things to opponents of the military regime. Now he sells bathrooms, but it seems he cannot escape his past – once a policeman, always a policeman. He responds to a friend’s phone call asking for help, but by the time he gets there it is already too late.
| No-one Loves a Policeman by Guillermo Orsi | |
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| Category: Crime | |
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Reviewer: Luci Davin
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| Summary: Argentina 2001: Ex policeman Martelli responds to a friend’s phone call asking for help, but by the time he gets there it is already too late. | |
| Buy? No | Borrow? Maybe |
| Pages: 368 | Date: April 2010 |
| Publisher: MacLehose Press | |
| ISBN: 978-1906694029 | |
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A great deal of this novel is taken up with Martelli driving hundreds of kilometres, talking to the local police near his friend’s home, and trying to find out what has happened. At first I was intrigued enough by the premise to keep reading and wonder why despite his protestations Martelli keeps getting back in his car, and doesn’t seem to need much persuasion to keep driving. However, I soon began to get a bit bored, and by 70 pages in I didn’t care that much who had murdered Edmundo or the various other corpses around.
Martello as a first person narrator never engaged my sympathy that much. I like reading about cynical, jaded detective characters but this one just failed to make me care. The other male characters stayed very flat, and the women could hardly be described as characters at all. There were lots of bits of description which added little to the narrative or the story, or to plot/character/setting development, and they just came to seem a bit pointless.
I wanted to read this novel for its setting in Argentina, as I would like to read more Latin American fiction, and I did find some of Martelli’s ramblings on his country’s politics, including his nostalgia for Juan Peron, vaguely interesting. However, this probably isn’t a recommendation when reading a crime story.
I was surprised to realise that the translation from the Spanish (by Nick Caistor) was into British rather than American English. I quite liked this and would be interested to read other translations by him from Spanish.
Thank you to Quercus for sending a copy of this book to The Bookbag.
Another novel set in Latin America, but in a fictional country there, is Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon.
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