Las bondades de un asesino

Maybe it’s because it’s a sharp, dirty parody set in a provincial town in England, or maybe it’s because of its lewd, irrelevant and sometimes outright provocative language; whatever it is, The Kindness of a murderer immediately brings to mind the magnificent film comedies of Guy Ritchie and Danny Boyle. At the same time, the novel’s ending contains a melancholy paradox that roots it in the best of Spanish humour, however shocking that statement might be. In fact, you could see The Goodness of a Murderer as the author’s bid to update the conventions of mid-20th century Spanish humour (typified in the famous Spanish comic, El Codoniz), transporting it into a sordid, rundown modern setting.