Alfaguara press pack for Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel 'El problema final' (september 2023)

A problem-solving novel, like those of yesteryear

Arturo Pérez-Reverte writes about his novel 'El problema final' (The Final Problem).

There are many forms of nostalgia, and writing novels is one of them. For certain novelists, including myself, telling stories is not only an exercise in creation but also a way of recovering, even rewriting, the books they once loved. Books that shaped their lives and their work. Their way of looking at the world, literature, and life.

'The Final Problem' is a professional novelist's attempt to regain a certain lost pleasure: to become an innocent reader again, or to play at being one (and the word "play" is essential in this story) by accepting the challenge of a detective story with the old-fashioned perspective of those times when every page you read was full of surprises, excitement, and intrigue. The problem, in this case, was that willpower alone isn't enough. You can't renounce, forget, or do without the perspective that a long life of reading has left you, nor the remnants of a profession, that of being a writer, which you've practiced for thirty years.

I saw only one way to solve it: to combine the veteran writer I have become with the naive reader I once was. To blend both sides: a sense of wonder and experience. At a time when what is now called crime fiction tends to pose its plots as "who did it?", my intention was to return to the old "how did they do it?", recovering the flavor of the old problem novel, the one (Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr) whose construction and outcome can be considered the resolution of a mathematical enigma.

Once that was decided, this novel was presented to me as a challenge: to see if all those years and those books I had read, and the life tied to them, were enough to create a plot that was a retelling of many others, but crafted in an original way, with narrative mechanisms that connected them to each other. Full of cross-references, winks, traps, and tricks of the trade, using a structure that would delight me while developing it and that would delight the intelligent reader, feeling both a victim and a participant in a wicked narrative strategy.

This novel couldn't be written in a one-way direction, with the author limiting himself to inventing or reworking previous materials. To solve, not just the enigma, but the technical problem of telling it, it was essential to appeal not to the readers' benevolence, but to their complicity. Even their active complicity. This wasn't, in short, the classic clash between detective and murderer, but rather a duel of intelligence between author and reader: a game of chess in which each wielded, as pieces (and also as traps) their knowledge of detective literature, an encyclopedic knowledge that could be turned against both of them.

I confess that I rediscovered the pleasure, not only of writing, of planning tricks and plots against the reader, because it wasn't enough to rely on my memory. I had to refresh old readings of mine, but I also had to read what I hadn't read before, and do so with the experience of sixty-five years of constantly using my library and three decades of writing novels. Consequently, the construction of 'The Final Problem', a nod to one of my favorite Conan Doyle stories, has given me a year and a half of reading happiness, revisiting not only the Sherlock Holmes canon, but also every piece of literature I found referring to the character. But that wasn't all, because the story forced me to delve deeper into the detective story of yesteryear, the mystery novel, the impossible crime enigmas, the locked-room murders, and other traditional elements; and that entailed the delightful need to return to the classics mentioned above, but also to Poe, Wilkie Collins, Chesterton, Futrelle, Gaboriau, Leroux, Edgar Wallace, S. S. Van Dine, Dorothy Sayers, Stanley Gardner, and many others, including Jorge Luis Borges in 'Six Problems for Isidro Parodi.' I have learned anew from all of them, and I have mercilessly plundered all of them.

And so, here you have it. 'The Final Problem' isn't a crime novel, with all due respect to those who write them, but rather a problem novel like those of yesteryear, only modern. A risky venture, which, while working on it, made me feel like an innocent reader at times, and a perverse manipulator at others. After all (life, books, play, enigma) what more could an author ask of a good story?

--

"We'd need a policeman," someone suggested. "A detective."

"We have one," Foxá said.

Everyone followed his gaze.

"That's ridiculous," I protested. "Have you gone mad?"

"You were Sherlock Holmes."

"No one was Sherlock Holmes. That detective never existed. He's a literary invention."

"Which you embodied admirably."

"But it was in the movies. It had nothing to do with real life. I'm just an actor."

They looked at me full of hope, and the truth is that I myself was beginning to get into the mood, as if the lights had just come on and I could hear the soft whirr of a camera rolling. Even so, I decided to remain silent, my fingers crossed under my chin. I hadn't enjoyed myself so much since filming 'The Hound of the Baskervilles.'

June 1960. A storm keeps nine people staying in a small local hotel isolated on the idyllic island of Utakos, off Corfu, in the Greek Mediterranean. Nothing foreshadows what is about to happen: Edith Mander, a discreet English tourist, is found dead in the beach pavilion. What appears to be a suicide reveals clues imperceptible to anyone except Hopalong Basil, a fading actor who once embodied the most famous detective of all time on screen. No one like him, accustomed to applying the deductive skills of Sherlock Holmes on film, can unravel what truly lies behind this classic locked-room enigma. On an island no one can reach and from which no one can leave, everyone will inevitably end up becoming a suspect in a fascinating mystery novel where detective fiction blends astonishingly with real life.

The Crime Scene: A Small Island Off Corfu

"Utakos was beautiful: a tiny paradise of olive trees, cedars, cypresses, and bougainvillea, with its jetty-shaped pier beneath the ruins of an ancient Venetian fort, a thickly wooded hill that still held the remains of a Greek temple, and, in a hollow of this hill, protected from almost all winds, the Auslander Hotel [...], with splendid views of the Albanian coast and the mountainous terrain of Corfu, which each morning stood out in the distance against the backlight of incredible sunrises. Not even the storm took away one iota of beauty from the landscape, as the intense northwest wind that churned the sea kept the sky cloudless, clear, blue, and bright."

A storm at sea

"A low-pressure center was moving toward the eastern Mediterranean and was set to become stationary between Cyprus and the Black Sea. This would cause force 9 to 10 winds, unusual for that time of year, to blow from the Gulf of Taranto, which battered the Ionian Sea and the western coast of Greece with such a violent storm that navigation around Corfu was suspended for several days."

A Victorian Hotel

"The villa was built at the beginning of the last century. Between the two World Wars, it became a lodging house. Later, my husband bought it and began renovating it as a residence. It's a shame he never saw it finished. […] The terraced balcony that surrounded three of the four sides of the building: a common corridor, surrounded by an iron railing, surrounding the rooms on the first floor (on the second, without a terrace, the hotel employees stayed) whose private spaces were decorated with geraniums in flower crates. In each of the divisions, there was a small table and chairs, also made of wrought iron. […] The soft hum of the electric generator next to the terrace could be heard, in the distance."

The Beach Pavilion

"The beach pavilion was a wooden hut. Hotel guests used it to change into their bathing suits and to keep sunbeds, umbrellas, and towels close at hand. It had a shower and a toilet, a shelf, a table with a stack of illustrated magazines—Life, Época, the Greek Zephyros—and a small icebox that was open and empty. There was no electric light, just a kerosene lantern. The only window faced the side of the hotel, and the door opened almost to the edge of the beach. On that side, the hill didn't offer much shelter, and the wind blew in gusts close to the ground, erasing all footprints."

The Suspects

Ormond (Hopalong) Basil

"I had just turned sixty-five, and the bones in my back were no longer what they had been. Age shrinks your body a little, but I retained most of my six foot seven frame, the flat stomach, and the narrow, angular face that had once been made so popular by movie screens. I also still had a certain flexibility of movement. […] Now I had gray hair, but I still combed it back, I was clean-shaven, and the well-worn tweed jacket (Anderson & Sheppard, naturally) and the knitted tie over my gray shirt gave me an aspect of elegant scruffiness. My dark, lively, slightly bulging eyes still surveyed the world with penetrating interest. […] I had escaped alcohol more or less in time and had some savings, even though my film career was dead and buried. After all, not counting the other films, I had made fifteen lucrative Sherlock Holmes stories. The detective they had seen on the screen was not a performance, but the physical and intellectual embodiment of what Conan Doyle had imagined. The actor Hopalong Basil tiptoed out and left the character on stage: Sherlock Holmes was me."

Paco Foxá

"He was handsome and not much older than forty. He spoke good English with a Spanish accent. He was tanned from the sun, and his slightly wavy black hair gave him the air of a movie star. He looked like someone who knew perfectly well how to tell a samba from a mambo. He strongly resembled a young man who was just beginning to make a name for himself in Hollywood at that time, Cliff Robertson. He found himself confined to Utakos almost by chance, at the end of a romantic affair with an unhappy ending. She was married and had decided to break off the relationship, furious at his refusal to support her in a legal separation from her husband. So two days ago, after a night of arguing and recriminations, she packed her bags and asked to be taken to the ferry."

"I write novels. […] They're cheap detective stories and Westerns, which are published in Spain and Latin America. None, except for one short story, has been translated into other languages... Popular novels, imagine that. I write under two different pseudonyms: Frank Finnegan and Fox Creek —he winked at me, looking for some complicity—."

Edith Mander and Vesper Dundas

"They had been traveling together for three months: a kind of classic grand tour that had taken them from Monte Carlo to Venice, and from there to Corfu with the intention of visiting Greece during the summer. They had been friends since they met in Paris, on the steps of the Louvre, right in front of the Victory of Samothrace. Two English women alone in Europe, just like in the novels of Henry James. And, as expected, they had instantly hit it off."

Pietro Malerba and Najat Farjallah

"Malerba was a heavyweight producer at Cinecittà and on major American film and television projects in Europe. […] He hugged me with resounding slaps on my back. Very Mediterranean, all in all, and very much like him. Very Italian. He was forcing his affection gestures a bit, so I assumed that with the mentions to my old glory he was trying to impress his companion, a mature but still attractive lady whose face seemed very familiar to me. […] I took off my hat, kissed the bejeweled hand, and performed the required social rituals. The fervor of the audience that had acclaimed her as a demigoddess had somewhat faded, but the celebrated soprano was in possession of a beauty on the verge of fading, though still effective: large, dark eyes beneath a silk turban, a well-drawn mouth, a nose that was hardly Semitic despite its Lebanese origins, age-appropriate clothing, languid and self-conscious manners, accustomed to the admiration of others."

Dr. Karabin

"He was a stocky Turk with a curly beard streaked with gray, whose hair, too auburn, was obviously a toupee; the director, someone commented, of a private clinic in Izmir."

The Klemmers

"The Germanic-looking couple (I later learned they were German, named Hans and Renate Klemmer) passed by me to take a table near the white stone steps. […] Hans Klemmer was stocky, sanguine, with light blue eyes identical to his wife's. A horizontal scar ran across his left cheek: the unmistakable mark of a student at the old German universities. I wondered, not without some malice, what he had done during the last war."

Mrs. Auslander

“There was no greater authority around than Mrs. Auslander, owner of the hotel and the island. Fifteen years ago, she emerged from an extermination camp.”

Gérard

“Gérard, the manager, was thin, distinguished, and French, and he dressed with sober aplomb in the black suit and bow tie appropriate to his dignified profession. He had beautiful gray hair, an aristocratic aquiline nose, and a gold tooth that, when he smiled, gleamed on the left side of his mouth, beneath his fine mustache. He was also a reasonable pianist.”

The Waiters: Spiros and Evangelia

“Evangelia, the waitress, walked around as silently as a cat.”

“The waiter spoke an easy-going English. He was dark-skinned, slim, and handsome: curly hair, country farm hands, and serene eyes. He had the slightly brazen physical appearance of so many young Mediterranean men who hang around hotels and restaurants, hunting for foreign women to sort out their lives for a few days, or a whole season; but I had seen him work and thought he was an efficient and serious young man. Mrs. Auslander and Gérard also seemed to like him.”

The Culprit

Arturo Pérez-Reverte was born in Cartagena, Spain, in 1951. He was a war reporter for twenty-one years. With more than twenty million readers worldwide, his books have been translated into forty languages, and many have been adapted for film and television. Today he shares his life between literature, the sea, and sailing. He is a member of the Royal Spanish Academy and the Association of Maritime Writers of France.

The Clues

Arturo Pérez-Reverte returns to the thriller to create an unparalleled homage to the classic detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes, and to the suspense films of the first half of the 20th century.

Literature and cinema intertwine in this devilishly intelligent novel constructed with all the hallmarks of classic detective fiction.

It is a narrative packed with references to genre literature and film.

His previous novels, 'Sidi,' 'Línea de fuego' (winner of the 2020 Spanish Critics' Prize), and 'El italiano,' have each sold more than 300,000 copies. His latest novel, 'Revolución,' was one of the books of the year in 2022, with more than 200,000 copies sold.

Recently featured on prime-time TV show 'El hormiguero' and on YouTube channels hosted by young influencers, he has over 2,400,000 followers on Twitter, over 637,000 on Facebook, and 260,000 on Instagram. Additionally, his weekly newspaper column 'Patente de Corso', published every Sunday in 'XL Semanal' magazine, has over 4,500,000 readers.

The Elementary Canon

The Immortal Sherlock Holmes

"I was the first to know that most of Sherlock Holmes's deductions and inferences, like those of Hercule Poirot or anyone else of that type, did not stand up to logical analysis. If they succeeded, it was because their novelist creators allowed them to. He handed me the book. It was heavy, a thick folio volume: 'Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Illustrated Strand.' The binding was badly damaged, but the pages were in good condition. I slowly turned them, admiring their old illustrations, until I reached page 118: Watson seated and Holmes standing, with his back to a fireplace. "Then he stood before the fire," the caption read. I showed it to Foxá.

"It was done by Sidney Paget in 1891," he commented. "Can you see them well in this light?... That print, the first to appear in 'A Scandal in Bohemia,' forever established the canon: Watson shorter and somewhat more robust, with his mustache, and the detective tall and thin, with a high forehead and a large, aquiline nose. There were other illustrators, but none came close to the essence of the characters." […] 

So I reached page 197. There was the classic image that no one could ever alter: Holmes in a dressing gown, smoking his pipe. I showed it to him as well. […] Then I stopped before an illustration from the story 'Silver Blaze:' Holmes and Watson in a railway carriage. Foxá leaned over to look at it.

"Here you see the hooded Ulster coat and the famous hunting hat," he said, pleased.

"Yes, but you can't imagine how ridiculous I felt when they made me wear that deerstalker cap in the first films."

Dr. Watson

"You'll need a Watson," Foxá pointed out.

He smiled knowingly, as if that had been settled: a willing assistant. I had no escape, nor did I really want to escape. "In and out of character," we British actors used to say. And that was exactly what was happening. In fact, I'd been inside for a while; longer than they knew. […] Perhaps because of breakfast, I felt imbued with a sudden energy, just like when in the movies I'd put on a coat and hat and invite Bruce Elphinstone to follow me out on a new adventure. I even thought I glimpsed my faithful Watson staring in shock at the Queen Victoria anagram made of No. 2 Eley bullet holes on the drawing-room wall."

Professor Moriarty

 

"I fear, Holmes," he said very calmly, "that Professor Moriarty has the advantage over us."