Leonardo Padura – författare

From Leonardo Padura—whose crime novels featuring Detective Mario Conde form the basis of Netflix’s Four Seasons in Havana—The Transparency of Time sees the Cuban investigator pursuing a mystery spanning centuries of occult history.Mario Conde is facing down his sixtieth birthday. What does he have to show for his decades on the planet? A failing body, a slower mind, and a decrepit country, in which both the ideals and failures of the Cuban Revolution are being swept away in favor of a new and newly cosmopolitan worship of money.Rescue comes in the form of a new case: an old Marxist turned flamboyant practitioner of Santería appears on the scene to engage Conde to track down a stolen statue of the Virgen de Regla—a black Madonna. This sets Conde on a quest that spans twenty-first century Havana as well as the distant past, as he delves as far back as the Crusades in an attempt to uncover the true provenance of the statue.Through vignettes from the life of a Catalan peasant named Antoni Barral, who appears throughout history in different guises—as a shepherd during the Spanish Civil War, as vassal to a feudal lord—we trace the Madonna to present-day Cuba. With Barral serving as Conde’s alter ego, unstuck in time, and Conde serving as the author’s, we are treated to a panorama of history, and reminded of the impossibility of ever remaining on its sidelines, no matter how obscure we may think our places in the action.Equal parts The Name of the Rose and The Maltese Falcon, The Transparency of Time cements Leonardo Padura’s position as the preeminent literary crime writer of our time.

Leonardo Padura''s award-winning Cuban detective series featuring Lieutenant Mario Conde.Havana Blue: It''s New Year''s Day 1989, and Lieutenant Mario Conde wakes up with another terrible hangover and a case which is close to home. His schoolboy rival, now a party grandee, is missing.Havana Gold: Lieutenant Conde goes on a trip through his childhood Havana haunts when a young female schoolteacher at his old school is murdered. And could it be that he has finally met the woman of his dreams? Havana Red: Conde''s fondly-held prejudices are tested by this case involving a man found strangled in Havana Woods wearing a beautiful red dress.Havana Black: Conde has been suspended for taking a well-deserved pop at a fellow officer. But then he is called in for a case involving the disappearance of a Cuban with U.S. citizenship who has come home to visit his family. Starring Zubin Varla as Mario Conde, David Westhead as Rangel, Lanre Malaolu as Manolo and Lorna Gayle as Josefina, Ben Crowe as Skinny, and Adjoa Andoh as Tamara.Dramatised by Jennifer Howarth and Joy WilkinsonDirected by Mary PeateLeonardo Padura is a novelist and journalist who was born in 1955 in Havana where he still lives. He is best known internationally for the Havana Quartet series, all featuring Inspector Mario Conde. In 1998 Padura won the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers, and in 2012 he was awarded the National Prize for Literature, Cuba''s national literary award.