The blue Rivadavia
By Luis de la Puente
Simurg Editions. 96 pages
From the era of commercial splendor of police narrative in our country, Ediciones Simurg has just rescued The blue Rivadaviaa forgotten classic, written by Luis de la Puente and originally published in 1952.
It is a nouvelle which was announced in number 25 of “Pistas”, a typical newsstand collection on the genre that, together with “Rastros”, began at that time to give space to the “hard line” of the police, with translations of Dashell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and others, along with other authors of the most classic lines.
It is possible to think that this work by De la Puente reflects in its few pages that transition towards the hard-boiled police, with its sarcasm, sensuality and incipient violence. Clearer is a certain allusion to the Perry Mason stories written by Erle Stanley Gardner and brought to television in those years.
Here the case does not revolve around a criminal lawyer but rather a private investigator, Larrazábal, who, however, also has the invaluable help of a secretary with a smug air, like the one demonstrated by Della Street, Mason’s faithful assistant.
In De la Puente’s novel, Larrazábal, who is about to abandon the business, is commissioned to investigate the disappearance of a young man, a philatelist who was tracking down a rare stamp, the famous Rivadavia blue, of great economic value. The investigation is revealing the existence of a major criminal plan.
The plot, in which there is no shortage of irresistible women, drinks and some beatings, unfolds between Buenos Aires and Montevideo, cities that are visited by the inspector on foot, by car or seaplane. The prominence of the streets of Buenos Aires in a police story is, in fact, one of the novel elements of the time, and thus we follow Larrazábal as he moves from Barrio Norte to Congress or to Palermo Chico.
There is still a mixture of mischief and innocence in the approach, which presents the duel between the inspector and the villains as a sporting competition. There is no sadism, there is no truculence, there are almost no excesses. It is, in that sense, an expression of his time.
Only with the passing of the pages does the inspector reveal himself as a weathered and rough man. But, also, something unsuspecting, clumsy, a loser, one step away from ruin. A nuance that is typical of the irony that the author wanted to imprint on his work and also on his protagonist.
As a backdrop to the characters, among whom is the head of the police investigation brigade, Della Croce – who is always one step behind Larrazábal – the face of a more contained, more trusting, more human society appears. , with a limpid look at the police, in which vices and crimes nevertheless appear that would only worsen over time.
Luis de la Puente is the author of seven other detective novels published by Acme Agency in its collections between 1949 and 1956. Its reissue offers an entertaining and, above all, refreshing read.
