Dogs Staring at the Sky (2022) is the final adventure of private detective Ricardo Cupido, a creature created by Eugenio Fuentes. Unlike other police heroes, Cupid has been growing up since his first appearance in 1990 in the Battle of Breda, where the author tells us about a group of children who have found their way in society. The novel has turned into a journey between friendship, love and the riddles hidden by the elders. One of these children was Ricardo Cupido Lasso, whose profile he had barely drawn because he was another character. From there, we learned that he was born in Breda, a fictional city located north of Extremadura. Later, he committed himself to tobacco smuggling, for which he was sentenced to twenty months in prison. In The Birth of Cupid (1993), he is released from prison and travels to Tenerife to visit Siro, a friend and colleague from the military who turns out to be a pot smuggler. Siro will appear murdered, and Cupid decides not to leave the island before he finds out why and who killed him. The character will be consolidated in the Jungle (1999) as Cupid will establish his residence in Breda and work as a private detective. From there, the national police added a new greyhound.
We later learned that he is not a detective profession, and in Mistralia (2015) he admitted that he had three talents: “loving, being a detective and ordering chaos and making money.” The problem with the latter is that it never learned to hold on to what it earned. He added that he suffers from the weakness of not knowing how to be happy. This allows him to contemplate the world with a “Galdian eye,” as his author puts it. Benito Pérez Galdós looked at reality with compassion, without criticizing the characters that melted into him, whom he would eventually understand and tolerate their weaknesses. This is the look Eugenio Fuentes gave his detective.
From Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle to the golden age of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, private detectives in fiction have always been knights-errant trying to bring order out of chaos. For this they needed a loyal squire, Dr. Watson is the most famous. In the case of Cupid, he will have Alkalino, with whom he maintains a solid friendship despite past heavy drinking. Another feature of his novels is that he stays away from dry style, linguistic harshness, harsh words and hostility to the titles of many authors of the genre, since he thinks that “today’s detective novel is more than a road”. comfortable, inexpensive and without side effects to combat insomnia».
In the final chapter of Dogs Stare at the Sky, the author continues to show us a bike-riding, faithless, peaceful hero who routinely gathers information as an investigative method, often witnessed by characters close to the victim. With this, he performs the reconstruction of the deceased’s life, which brings him even closer to his murderer. In this novel, Santiago, a prestigious doctor from Gregorio Marañón, decides to spend a quiet vacation with his family in Breda, his first destination after graduation. It looks dead a few days later. The investigation corresponds to the Civil Guard, but his wife, Moira, decides to hire Ricardo Cupido. From there, a colorful gallery of characters will begin to crawl through the pages of the novel, keeping the line of presenting them reliable and familiar to us. As the detective reconstructs the victim’s life, his past and present merge with the tides of the city of Breda, such that the plot resembles a matryoshka, where a wooden doll hidden in the previous one will always appear. and from the same tree. The result amazes and allows the author to close the novel gracefully.
Source: Informacion
