Translation Rights TQE / The Snake's Tail

A few streets pretty much in ruins are all that’s left of Havana’s China Town. When the ex detective Conde enters it, he cannot help remembering that he had already been there years ago, in 1989. The irresistible lieutenant, Patricia Chio, had asked him to help her solve a strange case: the murder of Pedro Cuang, an old man that was found hung, with a finger cut off and a circle and two arrows etched on his chest. These were Santeria rituals that brought on the investigation of other neighborhoods around the city. Conde discovered unexpected connections, secret businesses and a story of self-denial and disgrace that revealed the reality of many families of Asian emigrants and their sporadic contacts with Cubans. As the Chinese saying goes, he only had to find the snake’s tail to reach the head. In Conde’s comings and goings between past and present, in his loitering around a caotic city, we will breathe again the familiar air of the circle of friends, women, and dangers with which the Cuban detective will become involved.

“Leonardo Padura is the Dashiell Hammett of Havana.” The Guardian

Leonardo Padura was born in Havana in 1955. He obtained a degree in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Havana, and has worked as a scriptwriter, journalist, and critic. He is the author of essays, collections of short stories, and of La novela de mi vida (The Novel of My Life) about the poet José María Heredia, but is best known for his series of crime novels starring Detective Mario Conde. These have been translated into many languages, and have won prestigious literary awards such as the Café Gijón Prize in 1995, the Hammett Prize for best crime novel in 1997, 1998, and 2005, the Premio de las Islas, in 2000, in France, the Brigada 21 Prize to the best novel of the year, as well as several editions of the Cuban Critics Prize and the National Prize for Novel in 1993. The Mario Conde series, acclaimed by readers and critics alike, is thus far made up of six novels: Pasado perfecto (Past Perfect), Vientos de cuaresma (Lenten Winds), Máscaras (Masks), Paisaje de otoño (Autumn Landscape), Adiós, Hemingway (Good-bye, Hemingway) and La neblina del ayer (The Mist of Yesterday). In all of them, “el Conde” investigates cases that bring the reader to the heart of contemporary Cuba.