Weidenfeld £9.99 pp211

In Arturo Perez-Reverte’s captivating stories, the world of Alexandre Dumas’s musketeers is ingeniously transposed to 1620s Madrid. Inigo Balboa, their narrator, recalls his experiences at that time as the page and protégé of Captain Alatriste, a taciturn swordsman for hire. The Spain of Inigo’s youth is a superpower enjoying a cultural golden age, with the painter Velazquez, the playwright de Vega and the poet-politician Quevedo (a recurring character in the series) all working in a city that is “the capital of two worlds, old and new”. But he looks back on this era from a time of decline: the setting of “a sun that for two centuries had inspired fear and respect throughout the world”.

The plot of The Purity of Blood is typically slight. Alatriste and Quevedo agree to help a man rescue his daughter from a convent where evil clerics are holding her prisoner. Their raiding party is ambushed, and Inigo is captured. He is tortured by the Inquisition, who hope to force him to confess to having Jewish blood, and (unless Alastriste can save him) faces a public trial and burning with other Satanic subversives in Madrid’ s main square.

What is impressive is how much of Spain the author manages to pack into a short novel, which covers in turn the army, the church and the court (Olivares, the reigning royal favourite, is crucial to the denouement) and offers glimpses of artistic feuds and vivid sketches of Madrid street life. This is fiction that can be enjoyed on several levels: as a poignant evocation of doomed imperial splendour; as a clever literary game in which historical and invented figures rub shoulders; as a parable about racism past and present; or as a simple tale of swashbuckling derring-do.

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