Forget Poirot, Holmes or Marlowe: there is nothing urgent or even logical about Chilean detective work

If nothing else, a private investigator who has learned his trade from the works of Simenon stands out from the crowd. Cayetano Brulé, the hero of The Neruda Case, sets himself a course of Maigret novels on the advice of his first client, Pablo Neruda. ‘If poetry transports us to the heavens,’ the aged poet remarks, ‘crime novels plunge you into life the way it really is.’

Brulé, a Cuban exile in Chile, has now appeared in six detective novels by Roberto Ampuero, a Chilean professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa. The Neruda Case is the most recent; it is also the first in the fictional chronology of the series and the first to be translated into English.

The novel is set in 1973, when Brulé was a young man unhappily married to a fashionably socialist socialite, though the narrative is topped and tailed with chapters showing him looking back on the start of his career from the vantage point of middle age. He becomes a private investigator by accident, and at Neruda’s instigation. The old man, laden with honours and riddled with guilt, is dying of cancer; he wants Brulé to trace a Cuban oncologist. Money is no object. Without unseemly haste, Brulé pursues his investigation in Mexico, Cuba, East Germany and Bolivia. Glamorous women and secret policemen dog his steps.

While searching for the doctor, Brulé digs deep into his client’s past. Ampuero makes clear in an author’s note that the novel is primarily designed to explore Neruda’s elusive personality, the ‘grandeur and the meanness’, and the women he loved and betrayed. But Neruda is more than a poet: he has political significance. This leads to the second item on Ampuero’s agenda, which is Chile itself, ‘the beleaguered Titanic of the Pacific’, with Allende at the helm.