This is it, my last entry in my four book summer mystery blitz-read.  A Dead Man in Barcelona by Michael Pierce is an adept, fast-paced, and entertaining mystery set in Barcelona in the years following the 1909 uprising of Catalan nationalists protesting their conscription into the Spanish Army to fight for Spanish conquest of Morocco.  An Englishmen was killed during the uprising and two years later, another Englishman, a Mister Seymour from Scotland Yard, has come to take a look-see.

Life in Barcelona in 1911 was lively, Babel-onian in its mixture of languages and cultures, and striven with political parties, theorists, and debates.  The anarchists have always found fertile ground in Barcelona, but anarchism was just one of the many potent influences felt in the region, the others including regional separatism (brutally put down by Franco and throughout the Franco regime), the Catholic church, the black market (with the wide opportunities afforded by the Port and fishing activities), and the separateness as well as commingling of Arab, Spanish, and Catalan cultures.  A visitor to Barcelona today will still see all of those influences in the food, the architecture, historical landmarks, languages heard (the predominant one being Catalan), and the rantings of soap-boxing men and women.  Barcelona is alive, twenty-four hours a day, and no place is this more true than on Las Ramblas, a wide boulevard that leads down to portside Barcelona.  What is true today was true in 1911 and Pearce does an excellent job capturing the atmosphere of Las Ramblas and the overall Catalan landscape of the times.  He is less successful with his characters, all of whom, whether Spanish, Catalan, Arab, or English, seemed much too modern for the times which they are supposed to be representing.

Nevertheless, this book will entertain and will offer a little history as well. A Dead Man in Barcelona would be a fine companion read for a trip to Barcelona, and a lively guide to the most lively of spots, Las Ramblas, and the fascinating alleyways, courtyards, and plazas that surround it.  The port area of Barcelona has been cleaned up quite a bit in the last one hundred years but the spirit of the broad walking avenue that leads down to it will never be quenched.  Resistance, pleasure, and international intercourse (globalism?) all in one chaotic — anarchic? — place.