The friends of the perfect crime

The friends of the perfect crime is a novel written by Andrés Trapiello, set in Madrid in the 1980s (more specifically in the moments immediately before and after the attempted of the Coup d'état of February 23, 1981) and for which he won the Nadal Prize for the novel in 2003; according to its author it is a reflection on revenge.

This is a work with Cervantes overtones, not only because of certain explicit allusions to Quixote when he mentions the need for the detective genre to find its definitive liquidator, just as Cervantes did with the chivalric novel by giving it an epitaph, but it abounds in creating characters as secondary in themselves as the barber or the priest, without for this reason we find any Alonso Quijano or Sancho Panza anywhere. This converges with the concerns of the "letraherido" author of "When Don Quixote died" and "The lives of Miguel de Cervantes". He can't get rid of his side darlings even in this detective story and he takes them out everywhere in different guises in this beautiful carnival of intrigues.

Los Amigos del Crimen Perfecto are a group of socialites who meet in a Madrid cafeteria, who love crime novels. Part of their game consists of calling each other names of famous writers or characters from novels such as Nero Wolfe, Poe, Commissioner Maigret, Perry Mason, or the protagonist Sam Spade.

Spade works in a publishing house that only publishes black and pink novels, he takes care of the black ones. His mother-in-law, Luis Álvarez, is a police commissioner, a sympathizer of the coup forces.