“There is now an idiotic tendency to despise action in novels,” says a literary critic in Arturo Perez-Reverte's third novel, The Dumas Club, published in 1993. He is defending Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers and its sequels against the accusation that they are not sufficiently serious. Since Perez-Reverte has made his name with elaborate intellectual thrillers in which there is plenty of action, this character is clearly speaking for his author.

The King's Gold, however, as its defiantly run-of-the-mill title suggests, has no pretensions to be intellectual. It is the fourth in a series of the adventures of Captain Diego Alatriste, a 17th-century Spanish soldier, and its plot - the covert capture of a treasure ship from the Indies - is hardly more out of the ordinary than its title.

Perez-Reverte's real interest is less in the cloak-and-dagger stuff than in the historical period. Most of the action takes place in and around Seville during the early years of Philip IV's reign. The poet Francisco Quevedo makes a few appearances, as do the king and his minister, the Count-Duke Olivares, but most of the characters are the kind of swaggering killers - big-booted, wide-hatted, long-moustached and thickly jacketed (against being stabbed) - who populate The Three Musketeers or lounge about with their pipes and flagons in genre paintings of the time. Captain Alatriste and his immediate comrades are, of course, not only seasoned toughs and brilliant swordsmen, but are also sensitive and decent men, so much so that, rather than torture a man to obtain information, the captain prefers to terrify him with a recital of what he might do and then burns his own arm to show what he is capable of.

But although the heroes fight and are ready to die for king and church and country, none of these is shown to be worth a drop of anyone's blood. The once all-powerful Spain is in terminal decline, at war with its rising neighbours England, France and Holland, bogged down in Flanders, corrupted by easy wealth from the mines of Peru and the consequent greed and sloth of its people. If it were not that this novel was first published in Spain eight years ago, one might almost take it to be a shot across the bows of post-Iraq America. “All that remained,” reflects the narrator, Alatriste's 16-year-old page, “was arrogance and cruelty, and when you considered the high regard in which we held ourselves, our violent customs and our scorn for other provinces and nations, one could understand why the Spanish were, quite rightly, hated throughout Europe and half the known world.”

The descriptions of the sordid streets and underworld of Seville, including a last party in the prison for a celebrity criminal due to be garrotted in the morning, are well done, and the climactic capture of the ship is a fine piece of action in words, but by the high standard of this author's early novels (The Flanders Panel and The Fencing-Master as well as The Dumas Club) the tale is disappointingly thin and the dialogue banal. If Perez-Reverte continues this series he should beware of not treating action novels seriously enough.

The King's Gold by Arturo Perez-Reverte, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Weidenfeld £12.99 pp245

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