Translation Rights TQE / Past Perfect

On the first weekend of 1989, Mario Conde is woken from sleep into hungover reality by the insistent ringing of his telephone. The Old Man, his boss at headquarters, is calling about an urgent case he has to take on. Rafael Morín, the boss of an import-export firm, has not come home after the New Year’s celebrations. As it turns out, the missing man is an ex colleague of Conde from their student days at Pre. The man in question had a reputation for discipline and an enviable record even then, but above all, he had made Conde jealous by stealing Tamara´s love from him. Confronted once again by his adolescent love, Conde discovers that the perfect past upon which Rafael Morín has based his brilliant career has some suspicious elements worthy of investigation.

Lieutenant Mario Conde is a sceptical and world-weary policeman who offers us an unusual and surprising vision of Havana today. In Pasado Perfecto, Conde not only has to deal with the case of a missing person, but also with his own past, the lost dreams of his youth and with passions that he thought were long forgotten.

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.