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Carlos Clot, private eye, has seen it all. Born just before the oil ran out, he has endured Spain's election of a communist government, the resulting U.S. invasion and the rise of English as the official language. Now he prowls the carless, bicycle-clogged streets of Madrid, tracking runaway kids and errant spouses for $100 a day plus expenses. He keeps a bottle of whiskey in his filing cabinet under the letter I, for Indispensable.

Into his crummy office one day walks … ah, but we're getting ahead of the story. Clot is the hard-boiled, hard-drinking hero of Blood on the Saddle, the first novel by Rafael Reig to be translated into English (smoothly, by Paul Hammond). A finalist for the 2003 Premio Fundación Lara, Spain's top literary prize, the book has become a cult classic. Carlos Clot, said El País, Spain's largest newspaper, is "the new Spanish antihero."

If so, then Reig, 42, is the new antihero of Spanish letters. In five imaginative novels, he has subverted language, shuffled genres and generally had mucho fun — as in his 1992 "autobiography" of Marilyn Monroe. A mustachioed Asturias-born academic, he studied philosophy in Madrid and New York City and taught literature in Madrid and the U.S. Blood on the Saddle is your basic science-fiction-detective-western-literary romance, peppered with comic detail like a lowlife informant with a sideline in purloined celebrity X-rays ("A colonoscope of Ana Belén? It's yours. Plates of Julio Iglesias' prostate? You'll have 'em.") Reig's gumshoe has an unusual specialty: finding fictional characters who take on a life of their own, a hazard any novelist would recognize.

That's what brings Luís María Peñuelas, a writer of popular westerns, into Clot's office seeking help. Mabel Martínez, heroine of Penuelas' latest work in progress, has escaped from the pages, Roger Rabbit-style, in apparent despair over her creator's inability to advance the story. Other wayward women clot Clot's life. His ex-spouse ("for a good-looking woman she was beautiful") won't take his videophone calls. A housewife is entertaining a mysterious daily visitor, and her husband hires Clot to investigate. Meanwhile, magicians are missing the sawn halves of their lovely assistants, stolen in mid-act. Improbably, these trails lead to the doorstep of Manex Chopeitia, boss of the genetic-engineering firm that controls the national telecom and much else in the U.S.-Iberian Federation. Clot faces a dilemma: unmask Chopeitia's plans for world domination and risk death; or play ball and obtain Chopeitia's genetic treatment for his brain-damaged daughter.

As in all good westerns, justice triumphs and a cowboy comes to the rescue. But like a true noirish detective story, Blood on the Saddle preserves its moral ambiguities, and Clot lives to solve other cases. First, though, Reig has a different tale to tell. In his latest novel, Guapa de Cara (A Pretty Face), published in Spain last year with an English translation due in early 2007, a dead author tries to find her murderer. Sounds like a job for Carlos Clot, though the hero in this case is a schoolboy who leaves the pages of a children's book to … ah, but we're getting ahead of the story.

• DONALD MORRISON
• Rafael Reig transforms the clichés of the detective story into a surreal, comic masterpiece