From Nordic noir to Pradera: the canon that really hooks readers

From Nordic noir to Pradera: what readers who have read it all turn to next

There comes a moment in every voracious reader's life when bestseller lists stop being useful. They have read Luca de Tena, Puzo, Dumas and even García Márquez's Macondo, and the bookshelf starts asking for something else. A conversation that begins with a request for books that keep you «on edge» ends up, after several rounds of filtering, drifting into far less travelled territory: hard-boiled noir, cult authors and, in an unexpected turn, the political doctrine of Spanish traditionalism from the 1930s.

The first filter works like a rejection machine. Every batch of recommendations —Winslow, Ellroy, King, Hammett, Capote, Highsmith— comes back with the same answer: already read. The bar keeps rising until the criterion shifts from titles to authors. That is where the names that separate the enthusiast from the collector appear: Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Chester Himes, Charles Willeford, James Sallis, Derek Raymond and George Pelecanos. The way they are described is not kind: factories of bile, losers in a fog of booze, Harlem cops who make you laugh and flinch at the same time. No cardboard heroics.

Jens Lapidus and the packaging of Nordic noir

The leap to northern Europe comes with Easy Money. The verdict on Jens Lapidus is double-edged. In his favour: a former incivil defence lawyer who writes about drug dealing and money laundering as if he had sat on the other side of the table. Against him: the prose is all broad brushstrokes and the scaffolding shows in the sequels. Plus a warning about the marketing: he was sold as if he were the next Wallander when he is nothing of the sort.

With Stieg Larsson things get rougher. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy is dismissed as an airport thriller wearing a layer of message that does not fit. It is conceded that the family mystery hooks you —hence its global success—, but it is pointed out that the author was no stylist, that the heroine falls into certain tics and that there are paragraphs you could skip. The question about reading order is brushed off almost as a provocation: Lisbeth is the same ladder in all three volumes.

Did Víctor Pradera influence the Movimiento Nacional?

The thread changes register when El Estado Nuevo (The New State, 1935) by Víctor Pradera enters the scene. The answer qualifies the myth: it is pure doctrine —Catholicism as the foundation, organic suffrage, corporatism, the burial of liberalism and the party parliament—, but it was not the sole source of the regime. Pradera died in 1936 and never saw even the prologue of the project put into practice. What did take hold was his organic architecture for the Cortes (the Spanish parliament), with the family third and trade union representation, stripped of the Carlist regionalism he defended. They kept the furniture and threw away the root.

The conversation does not close the matter. The comparison with Donoso Cortés's Discurso sobre la dictadura (Discourse on Dictatorship) remains open, as does the question of how far Franco relied on these intellectuals or simply recycled loose pieces. Nobody offers a tidy answer. That is what happens when you mix crime fiction with counter-revolutionary doctrine: in the end the bookshelf looks odd, but well stocked.