Ballad of Dogs’ Beach     by José Cardoso Pires, Translated by Mary Fitton Original title: Ballada da Praia dos Cães Original language: Portuguese Country: Portugal   Published by Beaufort Books Pub. Date: March 1987 Format: Hardcover ISBN: 0825304164 List Price: $2.98 Not available for ordering Published by Dent Pub. Date: February 1986 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 181 pages ISBN: 0460024531 List Price: £4.50 Not available for ordering

Ballad of Dog’s Beach won the 1982 Grand Prize for Fiction of the Portuguese Writers’ Association, when Cardoso Pires, already the celebrated author of a dozen books was fifty–seven. Why should a mere thriller gain such recognition? This mere thriller is a fine novel, written by a marvellously mordant novelist who was born in 1925, just prior to the birth of the New State, the name given to the fascist-like Salazar regime, and was present in Largo do Carmo to witness its demise on 25 April 1974.

Based on a true story of intrigue and murder under Salazar’s regime, Ballad of Dog’s Beach begins with a chilling, because objective, fifteen–point forensic portrait of the body of an unknown man, followed by ‘Circumstances of discovery’:

‘Sand removed with every precaution, and man’s body found lying on left side, much decayed. Shoes were reversed...Woollen socks, well–worn. Wrist–watch (Tissot MM) stopped at 05.27.41. No documents, personal effects or evidence of identity. Shreds of clothing at no great distance, torn by dogs.’

Little more is objective. For much of the novel we (with the narrator) are inside the head — a sympathetic and thus profoundly disturbing interior — of Inspector Elias Santana who lives with his pet lizard, the Reptile; Elias is a superbly–drawn character whose presumptions, teasings–out, blind alleys, fantasies and base instincts draw us into a murky universe of possible motives and actions that culminated in the squalid death of Major Dantas. For within a few pages we know who the victim is: a soldier who escaped detention while awaiting sentence for his part in an abortive coup. We know who the suspects are: Mena, young, beautiful and far from innocent; the corporal, a scared boy; the idealistic architect. We know that all four holed up in a house. The superintendent informs Elias — nick–named ‘Graveyard’ — that the PIDE, the political police they don’t trust, are involved.

‘That corpse was ours when they thought we had a sex– crime, but the theory’s altered.’

If blood starts smelling of politics,’ Elias rejoined, ‘even the flies take off.’

The superintendent stroked his coat lapels.

‘Graveyard,’ he said, ‘whether they want it or whether they don’t, it’s political. The flavour is animus conspirandi. It tends to conspiracy, and what tends to conspiracy is, need I say, the concern of the PIDE. Otherwise, what are they there for?’

He looked up, and from where Elias sat was a brown Polaroid reflection of the window–pane and an auburn moustache above a nodding cigarette. Animus conspirandi. Or anus conspirandi, what was a syllable here or there...?

In the person of its agents we outstare the psychopathology of a corrupt state, as well as the curdled idealism and paranoia of those who would overthrow it. The safe house is scene of an erotic sado–masochistic reign of terror. Lipstick, semen, blood. Elias too — with his heartburn, his thin hair, his long little fingernail — is sexually obsessed. Fear and lust complicates everything until at last it sifts and simplifies. Nothing is quite what it seems, or what it has come to seem since policemen, rather than dogs, began to dig a body out of a sand–dune.

The novel intricately reconstructs the reconstruction of the crime. ‘Thus,’ writes Cardoso Pires in a concluding note, ‘fact and fiction, at every step, divide and come together, independent when parallel, conflicting when they meet; and no resemblance between truth and conjecture is purely coincidental.’ You bet.