The Summer Chavela Died

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary fragments · Year: 2014 · Authors: José Luis Correa

The writer José Luis Correa (Las Palmas, 1962) emerged at the beginning of this century in the literary genre of noir novels with a series featuring detective Ricardo Blanco as the protagonist. 

In his work The Summer Chavela Died from 2014, the protagonist must face an intricate criminal case in which the city of Las Palmas is shown as the backdrop during a scorching August. A corpse appears in an alley of La Isleta and the novel begins as follows:

“They only knew that the corpse was missing a finger, the little finger of the right hand. That he was about forty. That he measured one metre seventy-two, weighed sixty-five kilos and was not Canarian. That he died the same day as Chavela Vargas, one August night in the middle of a jellyfish plague in Las Canteras. And that nobody missed him[…] The guardian of a port construction site and the owner of a sad boarding house on Andamana street could shed some light on the foreigner. Yes. Very foreign. He spoke little and oddly. He muttered at length what seemed like prayers. He had been living in the boarding house for two months and earned a poor living clearing rubble from pontoons.”

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