Spanish Beauty by Esther Garcia Llovet, published by Foundry Editions (2025). A Book Review by Dan Anthony

Spanish Beauty is the first episode of Esther Garcia Llovet’s new Trilogy of the Spanish Levant. Her works have achieved critical success and cult status for their intense, cinematic style and offbeat Chandleresque realism. Garcia Llovet writes for several different cultural anthologies and periodicals, as well as being a translator from English and well respected photographer.

Spanish Beauty is translated into English by Richard Village, a specialist in literary translation from Italian and Spanish. He is the editor and founder of London’s Foundry Editions.

‘With a turn of phrase that always slays,’ it says in the blurb about Garcia Llovet’s prose. That’s a Hong Kong Phooey line:  ‘Quicker than the human eye’. It turns out to be right.

Here’s a Leonard Cohen style reflection on the way belief in alure only dies when we actually stop breathing: ‘She’s in a dress with sunflowers on it, though she must be seventy if she’s a day. This place is the biggest laugh in the world.’

Something on place: ‘Benidorm. Cheap culture. Beach culture, People who speak three languages without ever studying,’

Here’s more of the blurb: ‘ an eye for detail that is as forensic as it is cinematic, a sense of humour as dry as a glass of fino, and a wilful desire to break conventional genres, Esther Garcia’s love letter to the pearl of the Costa Blanca feels like the best of Almodovar in surreal, novel form.’

This is a great story. I recommend reading it, and the two to follow in Garcia’s trilogy following the exploits of dodgy cop Michela McCay on the Spanish Lavant. But it’s not genre breaking, its genre sustaining. As pulp fiction, a cultural Irish Curry Sauce from a Spanish chippy near the Terra Mitica theme park, it tastes great. There’s no doubt that the visual style this novel captures has a movie like feel. I wouldn’t say it reminds me of Almodovar’s reflective preoccupation with interiors: I get Tarantino – masses of that.

The blurb describes Michela McCay as ‘on a mission’. ‘She’s the hardest, shadiest officer in the Spanish National Police’. STOP. WAIT. She’s not. She’s got daddy issues, she’s got man issues. She’s beautifully presented as a thinker who acts because thinking hurts. She’s lovely, flawed, infuriating, self-destructive, occasionally alluring, deliberately contradictory. Even when she’s wrong, she’s right. The location of Benidorm gives Llovet a chance to ironise the genre she’s working in.

Everything in Benidorm is cheap and nasty, just like genre fiction; but Benidorm is fascinating, just like genre fiction. This double entendre or literary contradiction is what Llovet plays into, just like Chandler, who never really understood why he was credited with writing or maybe even establishing the American hardboiled style, without necessarily being credited for writing great literature.

Here Garcia is deliberately not trying to write great literature, but she’s asking us the question, with her shorthand lists of things-as-descriptions ‘why not?’

‘Sea by day, sea by night. Sky the colour of Fanta by day, and at the dead of night, the Milky Way, Venus, constellations looping like motorway junctions and maps of lost highways against the deepest black.’

‘A girl, no bikini, proper skinfull, throws herself into the sea.’

There are plenty of cheap gags and take aways:

‘His body has more tattoos on it than a Sunday crossword’

‘The skyscrapers are starting to light up like equalisers on a mixing desk. Everything comes with music in Benidorm.’

Garcia does a brilliant job of capturing the strange spaceship that Benidorm has become, stuffed with travellers from all nations, united by a common, shared belief, it’s nicer here than it is at home (wherever that may be). The strength of this story lies in its context. Bringing a fresh light to an old place. Isn’t that what a ‘novel’ should do?

The problems with Spanish Beauty aren’t to do with the concept, the theme, the setting, the intellectual mash up it swims through, the genre it contributes to, they’re more concerned with story and character.

Michela, the dodgy cop, central character and driver of a Zodiac (the book is full of references that chime with readers born around the same time as Garcia -1964- Jacques Cousteau was always nipping on land in his Zodiac) isn’t the hardest officer in the Spanish National Police Force. There’s no police procedure in this novel. The lack of reality concerning Michela’s character development isn’t a literary problem, so long as the story doesn’t cross a line differentiating the cheap counterfeit gifts on sale in the shops behind the main drag in Benidorm and ‘real’ brands that actually work. For serious aficionados of police procedural crime fiction this book is, as it says on the back cover, a convention breaker – it doesn’t do it.

Developing the ‘60s theme, Michael, Michela’s guitar playing, sprat fishing boyfriend, somewhat resembles Dillon from the Magic Roundabout. Michael Cane’s, Alfie gets a mention.  Then there are the groups:  the Russians, the English, the Belgians, the Catalans, the San Sebastian crew, the Kaminski Gang and then the reverse – the Catalans are not really majority Catalans, nobody is quite who they seem. The device of presenting everybody as they seem, grouped together in bundles defined by a Euro-centric point of view and then undercutting it, wears a little. This is crime fiction – we know nobody is who they seem to be before we open the elegant cover.

As the story develops, we realise that the real story, isn’t necessarily about the ownership of Reggie Kray’s iconic Dunhill Lighter, it’s about relationships: Michela and her dad, then everyone else. This is the first of the trilogy  to be published in English, and the book acts as an opener for that. We’re supposed to want more. We do. More to the point, we need more.