The Man Who Killed Durruti

A former policeman, now a Major in the Spanish Republican Army, is sent to Madrid to investigate the circumstances in which the legendary anarchist, Buenaventua Durruti, was killed. In his search for the truth he interviews key witnesses and uncovers a number of contradictory accounts. Nobody tells the same story in quite the same way, but as an experienced police officer, he knows it is not inconceivable that they are all telling the truth. But it is also possible that some of them are lying, that some are trying to hide what they know, and more sinisterly, that some may be seeking to sabotage his investigation for darker political ends. Making imaginative and ingenious use of the detective novel as a literary device, Pedro de Paz explores various hypotheses and scenarios that could at least provide us, seventy years on, with believable explanations about the chain of events leading to the death of a truly remarkable man. Also included are numerous photographs of Durruti and his funeral, and a lengthy afterword by Stuart Christie, putting his life, times, and untimely death, into the context of Spanish Anarchism, the social revolution, and civil war.

Stuart Christie was born in Glasgow in 1946. He has been an apprentice dental technician, sheet metal worker, barrow boy, litho printer, gas fitter, bookseller, occasional farmhand, lobster fisherman, writer and publisher. He became a socialist (Labour Party Young Socialists) at the age of 15, but moved rapidly to anarchism. He served over three years of a twenty-year sentence for ’banditry and terrorism’ imposed by a Spanish court for his part in an attempt to assassinate General Franco in 1964. Pedro de Paz is a Spanish writer. His first novel, El hombre que mató a Durruti (2004), won the José Saramago Novel Competition. De Paz’s literary output is mainly in the field of police and crime novels. He also writes articles and short stories.