Una del Oeste by José Javier Abasolo (review)

“A Christie for Christmas” became, for decades, an annual reminder for whodunit fans to purchase Dame Agatha’s latest Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple mystery installment. Reminiscent of such regular offerings, although not as seasonally punctual nor—to date—as prolific as Christie herself, José Javier Abasolo’s (1957-) industrious pen has brought forth no fewer than thirteen noir volumes in the past sixteen years to which one must add short story collections, a couple of children’s books, frequent articles in the trade journals, a busy blog, countless interviews and many invited talks—in Spain and abroad-- dealing with his own as well as with the state of affairs of a this popular genre taking root in Spain’s northern Basque (Euzkadi) country.

As a successful attorney in his native city of Bilbao, Javier Abasolo (he only uses his first name in print) began his foray into the world of fiction simply as a way to try his hand at what others, whose work he admired and had been reading for many years, were publishing. The experiment met with almost immediate success for not only did his first effort, Lejos de aquel instante (“Away From That Moment”), find a publisher quickly—an unheard of feat for an unpublished writer-- it also won an important literary prize, was a finalist in a second one, with a French translation soon to follow. Since that breakout year of 1997, Abasolo’s fictional world has grown more familiar to an increasing number of readers and critics, and though the individual works are quite different from one another, many of the themes, most of the locales, and the narrative strategies have become quite familiar to us. In the three most recent books prior to Una del Oeste (“A Western”), his latest and the subject of this review, Pájaros sin alas (“Birds Without Wings”) from 2010, La luz muerta (“Dead Light”) from 2012 and La última batalla (“The Last Battle”) dated 2013, Abasolo presented his readers with a serial protagonist, a former police officer named Mikel Goikoetxea, recycled as the private detective Goiko and whom he’s recently promised to bring back for more investigative adventures in the near future. At present there seems very little doubt that the character’s popularity will make such a decision an easy one.

Una del Oeste naturally should not be judged either by its cover, depicting a cracked compact mirror reflecting an armed cowboy statuette, nor even by its generic title which suggests nothing more than a western potboiler. And yet, it is indeed an old fashioned western narrative which greets the reader not only as its first but also its last (22nd) chapter. However, this western framing turns out to be nothing short of a red herring once we delve into a narrative so preposterous that it defies credibility. Here’s a text whose failings are so numerous (anacronisms, intertexts gone astray, risible appellations and dialogue, unlikely locations, ironic asides to the reader) that these inaugural pages cannot be labelled as anything but a misshapen parody of the real thing. A curious reader who skips to the last chapter seeking relief from such malapropisms will only endure similar torment. What to do? The answer is, keep reading, especially when confronted with a different typeset by the time we arrive at Chapter 2, and certainly after a thorough browsing that reveals alternating typesettings hinging on: a) the time of the narrative (19th century vs. 21st century), b) the place where events occur (Laramie, WY vs. Bilbao, Euzkadi), and c) the characters that populate its pages.

There are twenty two chapters (ironically, due to a typographical error, the last two chapters are numbered 22, the wrongly labelled 21 takes place in present day Bilbao, whereas the real—and final—Chapter 22 returns to the old West). Of these twenty two chapters, seven are set in a mythical old-west-flavored Wyoming, the first (I) and the last (XXII) serving as the frame for the whole narrative and the remainder which serve as a construct...