Confronting Conspiracies in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Late Carvalho Novels

This essay examines the conspiratorial worldviews of three of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s novels on detective Pepe Carvalho. It claims that Vázquez Montalbán’s conspiracy narratives, due to their preoccupation with the (in)adequacy of names and actions within a conspiratorial totality, complicate both their own gesture of social criticism and the possibilities of rebellion by literary characters. Moreover, the article shows that conspiracies are located at the upper-end of the social spectrum in these novels. Unlike other contemporary writers of detective fiction in Spanish, then, Vázquez Montalbán stops short of imagining society as a productive battlefield between opposing complots.