The Case of the Client from Nouakchott

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary fragments · Year: 1990 · Authors: Jaime Mir

Jaime Mir (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1964) wrote his noir novel The Case of the Client from Nouakchott at 25 years old, winning the Benito Pérez Armas Publishing Prize in 1990. Its main character is Carlos Alberto Rico "Jeque", a sceptical detective, sexist, an unrepentant seeker of sexual trophies and an objector to political correctness. Jeque accepts an apparently trivial case that hides an international criminal plot which will involuntarily lead him to confront unscrupulous villains and unsuspected dangers. A deliberately archetypal novel, it presents characters in whom the boundary between tenderness and harshness is not always clear. 

The Case of the Client from Nouakchott is set between Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in its streets, squares and cafés, and the Mauritanian city of Nouakchott. It tells a thrilling story, at the same time full of irony and literary nods aimed at famous genre detectives such as Sam Spade (Dashiell Hammett) and Philip Marlowe (Raymond Chandler), although all filtered through the local lens of life and customs in the capital of Tenerife during the 1980s.  

«The La Paz Kiosk is a place of anarchists, progressives or dealers, depending on the season. There are also the regulars, those from the song’s era. Because the kiosk has its song. A song from when the grises were grey and not brown. From when "The Bison’s Burp", as the group was called, sang for their people and not for the record companies. Those were fun times that the "Commander" and I lived together. He stayed there.»

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