The idea of re-editing the novel The lost money of Mariano Izeta is applauded, as it is almost an anti-intuitive bet to give a new role to the genesis of the black genre in Basque. The edition, made by Euskaltzaindia and the Baztan City Hall, can be read in an afternoon, as it is written in such a way that you can easily understand the story, which does not reach the 100 pages.

I didn’t ask Izeta’s novel to be “good.” If you have gaps, you will notice many things that are missing, both in the scenes and in the characters that are built, as well as in the nodes of the story. But it's written in 1962, it wouldn't be fair to require anyone who wrote "Raymond Chandler baztanés," without the literary warehouses that we have at hand today.

What doesn't happen so easily is the storyteller's ideological position. To say that the novel is moralizing is not exaggerated, nor to say that the voice that tells the story slips through power. For example, after a robbery, the police will arrest the “regular suspects”. You read that in the police station they have received “a trench they deserved” and then they have locked them (chapter 5) and then they are released. But when the second thing happens, the narrator does not recognize them or the innocence -- the malefactor is a criminal, except for this cause, for something else.

Even when the real perpetrator of the crime is clarified, “the temptation of the enemy” is the cause given to the robbery. Or, if not, wanting to live without work. The thief steals it because it's lazy, there's no other reason. The economic differences between superiors and assistants are considered natural things, understood as deviations to be corrected for violations of order such as theft. And a separate chapter would be worth looking at the role of women.

We do not refer to all things solely because we support other forms of political thinking: these opportunities the narrator made hurt fiction, so clearly judged the characters, that it left no room for surprises the story, as it happens with the writers who put the transmission of moral or ideological values above the possibilities of history.

Izeta’s work has advanced in the coming decades on the path of the unfolded black genre, more in the opinion of one than of others. Rereading the lost money is an interesting exercise to know what the starting point was. In the 1960s, our black novels also looked like a handbook of good practice. We've spilled something.