Spanish crime stories for learners

What Spanish does a crime story teach?

Past tenses, above all. A crime has already happened by the time anyone investigates it, so the people involved keep telling you what took place and what things were like. The three past forms you meet first sit side by side when a retired teacher wakes on the night train out of Madrid to find her brooch gone:

Then come the alibis, and an alibi is a little story told in the preterite, one finished action after another. A few hours later, the baker travelling in the same carriage dice que se durmió a las diez y media y que no oyó nada: she says she fell asleep at half past ten and heard nothing. Every suspect on that train gives an account like it, and every account has a crack in it.

Crime is also full of questions, usually fired off fast. Pilar asks the sleeping-car attendant who the young woman at the end of the carriage is, and he answers —¿Qué chica?, "what girl?", far too quickly. For more on Spanish question words in a detective story, see the Spanish mystery stories.

Which crime words come up again and again?

A small set of words carries every case. All of these appear in the free chapters:

• robarto steal, to rob
• el ladrón, la ladronathief
• el hurtotheft without force or violence (robo involves force)
• el sospechososuspect
• el culpablethe culprit
• el testigo, la testigowitness
• la comisaríapolice station
• el fraudefraud

The beginner cases also show you how Spanish gives orders, because an anonymous note is nearly always a command. In El Misterio del Lunes, Consuelo, a widow with a notebook, finds one under her door:

Which Spanish crime story should I start with?

• A1: El Misterio del Lunes, about things disappearing from a Madrid laundry room, or La Cartera de Más, in which a lost wallet comes back with 200 euros more inside.
• A2: El recetario de la panadería de la esquina, in which someone keeps correcting a bakery's recipe book in green ink, or La Habitación 7, set on the night desk of a small hotel in Hondarribia.
• B1: El Expreso de las Once y Cuarto, the locked-compartment theft, or La Farmacéutica de Menorca, in which a new pharmacist finds a newspaper from 1994 hidden in her late aunt's desk.
• B2: El Cuadro de Abuela, about a grandmother who once painted a fake Goya, Las cartas de la calle del Pez, set in a small auction house in Almagro, or La Testigo del Pasado, about a witness to a jewellery-shop robbery whose story keeps shifting.

Most of these are mysteries as well. Coming to Spanish fresh? Start with the A1 Spanish stories, or browse every Spanish series.