Terenci Moix

Written at the age of twenty-one and twenty-two, these are two novels in which the writer recreates scenarios in Rome and Paris, born from the heat of many hours spent in the cinema. He creates his own imaginary (and not so imaginary) nighttime cityscapes where high society elites rub shoulders with the most lumpen elements. He paints a portrait of freedom in the sixties, full of parties, in which nothing was prohibited, but danger lurked everywhere. Both novels revolve around the existence of a crime in which someone is incriminated and is forced to look for the real culprit. However, in only one case is the innocent party able to clear his name. What makes them similar is the investigation of the underbelly of the city and what distinguishes them is the more psychological slant in I Will Kiss Your Dead Body, and the more action-led plot of A Blonde’s Been Murdered in the style of a crime fiction novel. 

Extract from the prologue by Pere Gimferrer ‘What’s exciting about these books is the passion with which they were written; neither book would have seemed different, if years later Terenci Moix had put his name to them. His presence is elsewhere, and not in the approximate translation of ‘Ramón Moix’ by ‘Ray Sorel’. It is in every twist and turn, in every scene or frame, in each section, in every cultural or real-life allusion, in every aspect of the writing. Terenci Moix’s watermark is to be found in these texts in the rigorous way they are through and structured: they will remain as fixed in the imaginary of the reader as they were in the author’s one when he was writing them. They will go on to inhabit the same territory that Macho World and The Blind Harpist inhabit, for all of us, those most surprising Moixidian fables.