Letter from Spain #68

On fiction, heists, timing.

I’m back - and a belated Happy New Year to you all.

I haven’t Substacked since announcing the publication of The Madrid Connection in late November, and the last Letter from Spain was back in September. I’ll try to turn up here a little more often from now on.

With the recent, real-world geopolitical shock of US forces capturing Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, online commentators were quick to announce that Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan had anticipated it years earlier.

Clips from season two of the Amazon Prime series resurfaced within hours, timelines filled with certainty, and the familiar accusation was made: fiction, once again, had predicted reality.

In Jack Ryan, CIA analyst Ryan - played by John Krasinski - warns that Venezuela represents a global threat due to its oil and mineral wealth, its spiralling humanitarian crisis, and its proximity to the United States. In the series, the Venezuelan storyline ends with a corrupt fictional president exposed and removed through political manoeuvring and elections.

Reality, by contrast, arrived with airstrikes, helicopters and special forces.

Even US President Donald Trump compared the operation to entertainment after revealing that he had followed the raid in real time.

‘[Maduro] was in a very highly guarded ... like a fortress actually,’ Trump said. He added that it was ‘like I was watching a television show’.

We can become very attached to the idea that someone, somewhere, knew something was going to happen. But the show’s co-creator, Carlton Cuse, was quick to deny any such foresight. The storyline, he said, was never meant to predict the future, insisting the series - released in 2019 - was grounded in plausibility.

‘The season came from our desire to tell a fictional story about the forces at play, not from imagining an outcome,’ he told Deadline Hollywood.

‘What always surprises you as a storyteller is how often real-world events catch up to fiction,’ he added.

Tell me about it.

Back in October, when I was halfway through the final edits of a fictional museum heist at the Prado Museum in my crime-thriller novel The Madrid Connection, someone went and did one for real … albeit in Paris.

On 19 October, thieves wielding power tools robbed the Louvre Museum in broad daylight, making off with some of France’s crown jewels in a brazen, seven-minute operation that played out almost in real time across news channels and social media.

I wasn’t quite sure how to take it at first. There was relief, obviously - mainly that it hadn’t happened in Madrid - followed by the slightly queasy sense of recognition. The story unfolded exactly as I had imagined such a scenario might. The initial breaking news contained almost no detail, just breathless headlines and vague official statements.

Then came the escalation: the enormity of the theft, the audacity of it, the sense that something fundamental had failed. Accusations began to fly - between security teams, the museum, the French culture ministry, politicians and the police - each keen to put a little distance between themselves and events. It was, to my mild alarm, precisely how I had pictured (and already written) how things might play out among the Spanish authorities if something similar were to happen at the Prado.

The specifics, of course, were different. My fictional heist takes place in the dead of night rather than in broad daylight, involves a murdered guard, and sits inside a much larger plot.

But the mechanics were there: the access points, a ‘ladder’, the smashed window, the institutional confusion that follows an event nobody wants to have imagined in advance. In the end, I decided not to fight it. I couldn’t fight it. Instead, I allowed the Louvre theft to exist inside my novel’s world, referenced briefly by a couple of characters as a recent and unsettling precedent.

The Madrid Connection therefore takes place several months later, in a landscape where the unthinkable has already happened once - just not in Madrid. If anything, the Louvre made my fictional Prado heist more plausible. It served as a reminder - to me, and hopefully to the reader - that in matters of security, culture and human ingenuity, ‘it would never happen here’ is a phrase that rarely ages well.

And the heist isn’t the only place where the novel brushes up against recognisable features of contemporary life in Spain. Like most fiction, it borrows freely from the world around it - politics, football, housing, public life, social issues, scandals, crime …

A few years ago, while writing The Barcelona Connection, I worried that a bullfighter would be kidnapped by animal-rights extremists before the novel was published. In fact, I was surprised that it hadn’t already happened. The book began life as a screenplay when bullfights were still held in Barcelona. Once bullfighting was banned in Catalonia, I moved those scenes to Nîmes in southern France, where they remain in the novel.

In an early version of that screenplay, before Trump was a presidential candidate, I also wrote the character of a US president who was crass, overweight, inept, self-absorbed, and a serial sex pest. An agent told me the character was too extreme. ‘It wouldn’t happen,’ she said. ‘There would never be a US president like that.’

Reality or fiction? I rest my case.

It’s good to be back here. In my weekly posts from now on, I will start sharing details and images from my research for The Madrid Connection - much as I did (below) for The Barcelona Connection.

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A bit about me: on and off, I have worked in the media in Spain for some 30 years (click here for more info). Currently, in addition to writing my books set in Spain and developing them for the screen (see below), I also chat briefly on Wednesday mornings to Giles Brown on Talk Radio Europe about the latest news from Spain. I will be chatting with him again this Weds 14 January at around 11am.

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Books, Reviews, Research, News & Events

To anyone in and around Barcelona, come along if you can to this ‘Book Club with Author’ event at the Come In English Bookshop on Tuesday 27 January at 6.30pm. You don’t need to have bought your copy of ‘The Madrid Connection’ from the shop - in fact you don’t need to have bought it from anywhere! We’re simply going to have fun chatting about it, and it would be great to see you there. The shop says it would be best to register via the QR code or via this link.

Another date for the diary: on FRIDAY 17 APRIL I am going to be presenting The Madrid Connection in the Secret Kingdoms Bookshop in Madrid. More details to follow in due course.

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The Madrid Connection

Published on 26 November 2025, The Madrid Connection is a standalone crime-thriller, but also a sequel to The Barcelona Connection (see below).

Here’s the back cover blurb from The Madrid Connection:

Of all the paintings in all the galleries in all of Madrid.

They chose a Caravaggio.

And they chose last night.

On the night Madrid hosts the Champions League Final, disaster erupts at the Prado Museum: a guard is murdered and a Caravaggio is stolen.

British art detective Benjamin Blake, hoping for a quiet few days in the city on a low-key assignment, instead finds himself dragged into the chaos he swore to avoid.

Suddenly he’s the investigation’s uninvited headache – and possibly its key.

Rival mafias begin circling. The Asians want him gone. The Italians want him alive – at least for now.

As the cultural bureaucrats drag him into the case to deflect from their own failings, Madrid’s homicide chief – choking on his own lies – wants him nowhere near the case, let alone the truth.

Across the city, journalist Elena Carmona is in Madrid on a separate assignment, digging into the poison of racism in football – an evil that opens into a far wider conspiracy.

Trafficking, exploitation and revenge run beneath the pitch and deep into the criminal underworld, drawing her straight towards the same mafias now circling the stolen Caravaggio.

As her investigation crashes straight into Benjamin’s, they find themselves at the centre of something far darker than either imagined.

Art, money, football, murder, mafia – Madrid was never going to keep them apart.

The Madrid Connection is a fast, gripping and darkly funny page-turner - the perfect sequel to The Barcelona Connection.

As with The Barcelona Connection below, I’ll be posting more details about the research behind The Madrid Connection over the coming weeks - together with many photos taken in Madrid of the locations in the book.

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The Barcelona Connection - Research & development for the screen

‘The Barcelona Connection’ is in development for the screen, and I hope I will be able to post further news about this here in due course.

Research: In my weekly ‘Letter from Spain’ from #7 right up to #42, I included notes about all the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection. Many of the posts include photos and descriptions of locations that appear in the book, from Nîmes, Figueres, Cadaqués, La Bisbal d’Empordà and, of course, many areas of Barcelona. There are also posts about Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and ‘The Face’, the Dalí Museum in Figueres, the Picasso Museum and MNAC in Barcelona, even Girona Airport and nearby motorway service station - as well as the G20 Spouse Party, museum visits and ‘art attacks’. I hope the notes about the research are of interest … and I hope you might buy, read and take The Barcelona Connection with you to some of the locations that appear in the book! If you do, please send me a photo and I’ll post it here …

The Barcelona Connection - Book & Reviews

A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three. Every crime scene is a work of art …

Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective. Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don’t always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don’t, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.

Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his hire car stolen, together with the painting.

Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.

From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …

If you can’t locate a copy of The Barcelona Connection in your local store, it can be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBNnumber: 978-1-7393326-1-7.

It is also available in print or as an eBook via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from.

Click here for the latest reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads.

A review by Michael Eaude of The Barcelona Connection was published in the October 2023 edition of Catalonia Today.

‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’

‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’

A review by Dominic Begg of The Barcelona Connection was published in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.

‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’

‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’

Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.

‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’

‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’

Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.

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A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid - Book & Reviews

Eighteen years since it was originally published, ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’ has been re-issued with a new introduction, new cover and five extra chapters that were cut from the original book.

It is available in print and as an eBook worldwide, in both formats. You can also order the new paperback or digital edition via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the digital version on Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, or on many other platforms by clicking here.

If you’ve never read the book, I hope you will now acquire a copy and laugh out loud. If you did read and enjoy the original edition, I think you’ll love this new edition with additional chapters! More details about the book and links to many reviews are below.

As with previous posts showing images and locations that form part of the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection novel (above), I am also planning to publish an archive of photos here of Madrid that relate to many chapters in ‘A Load of Bull’ - although it will take time! In Letter from Spain #52, I cover Chapter 1 - the Centro Colón aparthotel (entrance) Watch this space for further images …

A LOAD OF BULL - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid

The hilarious true story of an Englishman sent to Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue …

In the late eighties Tim Parfitt blagged his way into a job at Condé Nast in London and from there into a six week stint in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Six weeks turned into nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Along the way, Tim Parfitt discovered the real ‘real’ Spain. He never saw a Costa and he certainly never bought an olive grove. Instead, he discovered a booming city in hedonistic reaction to years of fascism, where sleep was something you only did at work and where five hour lunches invariably involved a course of bull’s testicles.

Tim Parfitt’s rise from unwanted guest to paparazzi-pursued mover in Spain’s glamorous social scene is a hilarious comedy of errors. Frothing with a language designed to make foreigners dribble, hospitalised by tapa-induced flatulence and constantly frustrated by the unapproachable beauty of the women parading through the Vogue offices, he nevertheless falls in love with a city, a country and its people - despite the fact he hasn’t a clue what they’re on about.

You can click here for all the reviews of A Load of Bull on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads.

Links to newspaper and magazine reviews:

‘A hugely entertaining memoir ... frequently laugh-out-loud funny.’ (The Daily Express)

‘Parfitt is no ordinary Englishman … his light touch and neat line in self-deprecating humour perfectly suits this entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.’ (The Sunday Times)

‘A love letter to Madrid ... brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place.’ (The Daily Mirror)

‘Often hilarious ... a side-splittingly funny travel memoir.’ (BBC Online)

‘Vivid yet affectionate … fascinating, escapist stuff.’ (OK! Magazine)

‘Magnificent ... brilliant and moving, hilarious and truthful.’ (La Vanguardia)

‘Don’t miss it … Madrid through the eyes of an Englishman.’ (Vogue España)

Spanish edition

A Load of Bull was also published in Spanish under the title, Mucho Toro - las tribulaciones de un inglés en la movida. Click here or on image below for the current eBook version.

Contact Details

You can email me at: tim.parfitt@hotmail.co.uk