Torremolinos, Not Quite Paradise

A Finnish-Spanish TV Series Triggers A Flashback

Having processed most of the international subtitled streaming murder mysteries over the last half dozen years on the major streaming channels, I watched the first episode of The Paradise, on Amazon Prime. The problem is that the streaming services such as AmPrime have been offering limited episodes, then sending viewers to related pay channels, in this case, Acorn. Collusion? Almost certainly. In a normal world, one might complain, but the global media hierarchy has become so complaint-resistant that I subscribed to Acorn. There are hundreds of shows, mostly British, so no worries. It costs far less to subscribe to this newsletter than it does to pay for Acorn.

The Paradise is the ne plus ultra of my secondary beat and primary TV and reading preference, Quaint Location Crime Fiction (QLCF). It takes place in both Oulu, Finland, and Spain's Costa del Sol, with Malaga the nearest international airport. The action in Spain takes place in Fuengirola, home (pre-COVID) to 15,000 to 25,000 Finnish speaking residents, and in nearby Torremolinos.

I am aware of Oulu because when I opened an Instagram account, the first person I contacted was a woman living in Oulu. I wanted to make her acquaintance because of my fondness for Bordertown, the first great Finnish TV series to break through to an international audience via Netflix. The woman on Instagram living in Oulu is originally from Portugal. She is a tattooed lesbian stripper who never replied to my question about Finnish TV, did not follow me back, and so I have finally deleted her. For the most part I don't exist on Instagram, except for former students, who all prefer IG to other social mediums.

The Paradise features 60 year old Oulu detective Hilkka Mäntymäki. She is the primary caretaker for her husband, a still revered college professor who is in memory freefall from dementia/Alzheimer's and needs full-time care. But Hikka misses the action, and when a Finnish family is murdered on Spain's Costa del Sol, she leaves her husband, daughter, and grandchildren, to go help the local Spanish police solve the crime. She radiates a beauty that even much younger men, like Andres Villanueva, her handsome counterpart in Spain, can't help but take notice. She's also tough enough to disarm a psycho who has handcuffed her. She draws him close enough to deliver an overpowering kick to the nuts, retrieve her revolver, and chase him down.

Fran Perea, left, and Riitta Havukainen, as the police officers Andres and Hilkka in The Paradise

The characters speak in Finnish and Spanish or a combination, and when a suspect, or character, speaks neither language, they speak English. The first episode was a little confusing because of the trilingual situation, and the need to introduce many characters and locations, and establish a plot line. Which is: Finland has large expat community in Costa del Sol, for which a new condo community called Paradise is being developed. There are already many Finns there, in RV camps and caravan communities. There is also a powerful new designer drug created in Russia being shipped from Finland through Europe to this party-mad resort area on Spain's Mediterranean coast, knowingly or unknowingly by these Finnish families.  

The drug, called Sampo, has a design flaw, especially for a party drug. It comes on like ecstasy but accelerates into something a little worse than the Blue Meth in Breaking Bad. It makes the user feel indestructible, manic, crazy, heart-attack hyper, aggressive, paranoid, homicidal, suicidal. Stuff like that. One would guess that the come down is so severe that to avoid those effects, the user needs more, more, more.

The Finnish-Spanish connection may be new to viewers, but I have a kind of history with it. I was aware of the large British colony in the Costa del Sol, a fatuous collection of bored pleasure seekers wittily and bitterly depicted by J.G. Ballard in his 1996 novel, Cocaine Nights. It took a few episodes of Paradise to remind me of the Finnish journalist I met in Torremolinos with whom I only spoke Spanish.

It was early 1976. Publicist Susan Blond, then at Epic Records, called me and asked what I was doing that weekend. No plans. She asked if I wanted to go to London and Copenhagen, all expenses paid. No promised coverage necessary. Why not?

It was three days and nights of seeing up-and-coming international signings. In London, we drank and dined and saw performances by Sailor and Boxer. A U.K. British Boxer album cover, which features a boxing glove straddled by a nude model, may have been an inspiration for Spinal Tap's controversial "original" Smell the Glove album design. (Boxer's album was redesigned for the U.S. release; Smell the Glove became Spinal Tap's The Black Album.)

Then, off to Copenhagen for a show and more parties with Gasolin'.

It was the era of the "open return" airline ticket. I told Susan I was going to stay at the hotel in Copenhagen (Scandanavian modern, no surprise), a few more days after the junket, eat smørrebrød and drink Aquavit. I went to a bar and had to avoid a fight with a drunk who was so anti-war, his politics so far to the left of Baader-Meinhoff, that simply me being American, albeit a long haired and bearded and Vietnam draft-avoider, made him want to beat me up. Maybe he was on Sampo. The other Danes in the bar were nice, and when I was done drinking they distracted him so I could leave unbothered.

It was very cold in Copenhagen. Tivoli Gardens was closed for the season. I called the publicist from CBS Records Denmark who had hosted the Gasolin' party. She didn't want to get together. I had a cold coming on, and I wanted to go somewhere warmer. I went to a travel agency with my paid-for airline ticket: New York-London-Copenhagen-New York. Malaga, Spain, on the Costa del Sol, looked like it might be warm, or warmer. The travel agent calculated redirecting my ticket home. It would be $90. Sounded good to me! Then she ran in through the system one more time, and apologized. To fly from Copenhagen to Malaga to New York would cost me nine dollars.

It was chilly in Malaga, and my cold had gotten a little worse. I took the airport bus to a beach hotel in Torremolinos, full of British and German tourists. Checking in for almost a week: That cost $90, a room with ocean views. (It was off season.) Most people took package tours that included dinners in tourist restaurants. I tried one night and it was like cafeteria food. The next night I wandered away from the tourist district to what looked like the native quarter: small, narrow, winding streets, restaurants with seafood and paella. 

From the get-go, I had made one decision: I was going to speak Spanish wherever I went. I knew a lot of words, I had a good accent. I couldn't conjugate verbs at all, the devil in the details in speaking Spanish well. Sod you, poner and pongo! The desk clerks at my international tourist hotel spoke English, of course, and the first thing I should have asked for was a doctor, since my chest cold and stuffy nose were not getting better. A course of antibiotics would have helped, but Dr. Robins had already self-prescribed large nightly doses of Presidente brandy.

At the restaurant in the local quarter, I saw an attractive blonde woman with long, lovely nails, dining alone and reading a Harold Robbins paperback. En ingles. I did my "habla usted ingles?" routine. "Of course I do, doll." I invited her to join me. She was from Arizona, just kind of hanging out in Torremolinos. She was a "hostess" at a club, and gave me her card and a pass to the club. I thought about going, but she told me nothing really happened until midnight. And I was too sick to stay up that late.

I did find one place to hang out every night after dinner for a few hours. There was an English pub, called The English Pub. Despite its name, I insisted on ordering and speaking in Spanish, or Spanglish, or whatever it was I pretended I was speaking. To the bartender, who was likely from Manchester: "Un Presidente, por favor."

Someone asked me what my job was. "Soy un periodisto," a journalist. The man who asked me was very excited, since he too was a journalist, from Finland. We became quick pals, meeting there every night, and communicating in broken Spanish. Because he, and the bartender, thought I was Spanish. And he was Finnish, and had a smattering of Spanish. It struck me as odd, because most educated Finns spoke English. Which he did, but he did not think I spoke English, because we kept communicating, and I kept ordering from the bartender, in Spanish.

Towards the end of the stay, I was tired and sicker and asked the British bartender for a Presidente brandy and some water. He looked at me astonished. "You're American? You speak English?" I coughed and said sure, but I wanted the opportunity to develop my Spanish chops. Despite the fact that I was in the English Pub, the Union Jack was everywhere, and many people were speaking English.

What was a Finnish journalist doing in Torremolinos? He was writing a series about his countrymen who were seasonally migrating to the Costa del Sol for holidays. They were even building condos for the Finnish expats down the coast in Fuengirola. So much Finnish was being spoken that even the local police were learning it. Pretty much exactly like the situation developing in The Paradise, the Finnish TV show that takes place in this part of Spain on the British streaming channel Acorn.

When I flew home on KLM, I asked for a no-smoking seat. Not only did I get a middle seat in the smoking section, but the Dutch man sitting next to me smoked a pipe. He puffed that pipe the entire trip. By the time I got to JFK, I had no choice but to call a doctor, who said I had acute bronchitis. They loaded me up on elephant antibiotics, and it only took about three weeks before I could get out of bed.