Like any good private eye, Pepe Carvalho refuses to let a little death get in the way of his inquiries.

More than 13 years after the demise of his creator, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Spain’s most famous fictional detective is to rise again to walk the mean streets of Barcelona at the fingertips of another renowned writer.

Pepe Carvalho – gumshoe, gourmand, former communist and ex-CIA agent – made his debut in Vázquez Montalbán’s 1972 novel Yo Maté a Kennedy (I Killed Kennedy).

In a series of stories published across more than three decades, the author and his private detective chronicled corruption, violence and political and social upheaval in Spain and far beyond its borders.

Amid the chaos and lies, Carvalho always found time for food (“Sherlock Holmes played the violin. I cook.”), mischievous literary criticism and the odd cynical aphorism (“The cops guarantee order. All I do is uncover disorder.”).

Vázquez Montalbán, a hugely prolific novelist, journalist and poet whose youthful activism led to him being imprisoned and tortured for 18 months under the Franco dictatorship, died of a heart attack in 2003, aged 64.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Luca Zingaretti as Inspector Montalbano in the Italian TV series based on Camilleri’s character. Photograph: PR

His work remains hugely popular in Spain and around the world, and his legacy lives on in the name and character of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano.

After talks between Vázquez Montalbán’s family and publishers, custody of Carvalho has now been entrusted to Carlos Zanón, who is working on a new novel set to appear next year.

Zanón, a fellow Catalan poet and novelist whose work has been compared to Vázquez Montalbán’s, was initially daunted by the commission but has come to relish the inheritance of arguably the most enduring character in late 20th century Spanish fiction.

“He’s the only literary character who’s lasted,” Zanón told the Guardian. “Vázquez Montalbán created a bit of a mythical figure. Carvalho was a tool to allow him to get out on to the street and see what was going on. Vázquez Montalbán had a real talent for sifting things and seeing which issues were important and which weren’t. He had a great nose for it.”



Perhaps because the novels were written quickly – Zanón compared the process to a punk band meeting, rehearsing and putting a record out in under a week – they acted as immediate commentaries on a rapidly changing society. “I think that’s something we really miss now. There aren’t a lot of writers who can look at society and decipher what’s happening in it so quickly.”

Zanón was equally taken with his predecessor’s ability to discern the darkness and sin that has long lurked in the Catalan capital. “He managed to set noir novels in Barcelona with all of the imagery that comes with it,” he said. “That’s part of the noir tradition, making Barcelona a borderland a bit like [Jean] Genet with his putrid view of the city. He brings in the American hardboiled stuff but then he adds really original stuff like the gastronomy and the popular music.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, left, at a 2001 meeting in Mexico City with Zapatistas. Photograph: Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images

Zanón was confident he had a home advantage over other authors. “The neighbourhoods I’ve written about are different from the ones he [Vázquez Montalbán] wrote about, but I think it’s important to capture how people live in the city. It’s not just about knowing the streets; you have to know how the people get along and how they order a coffee when they walk into a bar … It’s the little things that show how people are and you only get them if you’re part of the city.”

Belén López Celada, editorial director of Planeta, which published Vázquez Montalbán, said crime fiction was currently enjoying “a new golden age” from which a key character had been absent for too long.



“The Spain of Vázquez Montalbán’s books – the social and political background – is always really important and you can see it evolving throughout his novels,” she said. “When you come to reread them, some of the themes, like corruption, jump out at you. And you go: ‘Wow! He was so right!’

“There’s something visionary about Vázquez Montalbán: people who are reading him for the first time – and even those who have read him before - can see just how intelligent and brilliant he was; how he managed to see things before they happened in this country. The question was: what would happen now if Carvalho was still walking the streets of Barcelona?”

Zanón was reluctant to give away the secrets of his work in progress, but he agreed that Spain in the second decade of the 21st century was abundantly fertile territory for Pepe Carvalho. He pointed to the proliferation of political corruption scandals, the emergence of new parties such as Podemos and the bitter independence debate in Catalonia.



“There are so many things and situations that I’d like to get Carvalho’s take on,” he said. “I’m going to try to make it a noir novel that sketches out everything that’s going on in Catalan society politically when it comes to independence, for example, or the new parties, or corruption. These issues need to come out: it’s the end of a political class that’s been around since the transition but which is now totally out of the game.”

Characters who outlived their creators

Eight decades after Arthur Conan Doyle’s death, in 2011 Anthony Horowitz published The House of Silk, the first new Sherlock Holmes adventure to be officially approved by the Conan Doyle estate. Holmes has also been reimagined as a 21st-century sleuth in BBC adaptations by Mark Gatiss and Stephen Moffat.

Agatha Christie died in 1976 but her diminutive Belgian detective Hercule Poirot returned in 2014 in Sophie Hannah’s The Monogram Murders, followed last year by Closed Casket by the same author.

Philip Marlowe has been stirred from the big sleep on more than one occasion, most recently in 2014 when John Banville gave his own spin on Raymond Chandler’s private eye in The Black-Eyed Blonde.

And since Ian Fleming’s death in 1964, James Bond books have been written by a distinguished rollcall of authors including Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd, while Charlie Higson has written a series of Young Bond novels.