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On June 11, 2026, Sergio Ramírez’s fourth crime novel, The Curse of Ramfis, will arrive in bookstores at the Madrid Book Fair in Spain. In the novel, Inspector Dolores Morales, living in exile in Costa Rica, investigates the murder of a businessman linked to the Ortega-Murillo regime aboard a luxury sailboat stranded in Costa Rican Pacific waters near the border with Nicaragua.
The sailboat, the Sea Cloud, which now offers luxury cruises for wealthy tourists, was once the Angelita, owned by Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, and later by his son Ramfis Trujillo, Ramírez explained in a conversation with CONFIDENCIAL while describing the setting of the novel’s plot, which unfolds amid corruption, money laundering, and migrant smuggling.
Preceded by The Heavens Weep for Me (2008), No One Weeps for Me Now (2017), and Tongolele Did Not Know How to Dance (2021), which was censored by the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship and banned from bookstores in Nicaragua, The Curse of Ramfis, the fourth detective novel featuring Inspector Dolores Morales, the writer’s alter ego, once again brings contemporary Nicaraguan history onto the page.
“The life of Inspector Dolores Morales is tied to the political fate of the country,” Ramírez says of the character, who has aged over the last two decades. “If he remains in exile, then another case will find him in exile. If there is change in Nicaragua, he will return to Nicaragua and reopen his investigative office. This is a character governed by reality. As a contemporary character, he cannot escape reality,” the writer warns.
Your fourth novel about Inspector Morales is written in a very Nicaraguan Spanish, yet it is also universal. What does your character’s name symbolize? For example, the detective in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s crime novels is Pepe Carvalho; Leonardo Padura’s is Mario Conde; Paco Ignacio Taibo’s is Héctor Belascoarán Shayne. Their names all have a certain peculiarity. But the detective in your crime novels seems almost like a declaration of intent. How did the name Dolores Morales come about?
The first meaning detective names have in novels is that they are part of a game, and this goes back to Chesterton and his detective, Father Brown, who was a priest. At the time, in the late 1920s and 1930s, a priest serving as a detective was a real novelty, because traditional detectives worked in police headquarters, sat behind desks, and were people without any particular distinction.
Then came the American detectives invented in the 1940s, heavy drinkers, neurotic, womanizers. From there emerged figures like James Bond and Detective Marlowe. Mine, meanwhile, is a former police officer who later becomes a private investigator, but his greatest singularity is that he moves alongside contemporary history, from the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat in 1990, through the democratic governments that followed, and then the Ortegas’ return to power. So he is a contemporary character.
But his name is “Dolores Morales.”
Exactly, and it has a strange resonance, because some people do not understand how a man can have a woman’s name. But that is very common in Nicaragua. I had an uncle named Mercedes Gutiérrez, and there are men named Guadalupe, Mercedes, Dolores. I suppose it comes from mothers entrusting their sons to the Virgin Mary: the Virgin of Light, the Virgin of Pilar. I had an uncle named Francisco Luz, from “light,” from “Pilar,” names that are fairly traditional.
This character comes out of the guerrilla struggle during the revolution against Somoza. He was a Sandinista, later an anti-drug police officer, then became a private investigator and ended up posted to the Honduran border. In the third novel, he returns to Nicaragua during the April Rebellion, and after carrying out several investigations, he ends up exiled in Costa Rica. Is he inspired by real police figures, or is he also your alter ego?
He is an alter ego, really. The only difference is that I ultimately ended up exiled in Spain, while he ended up exiled in Costa Rica. But as his life keeps unfolding, every book in the series begins with a Wikipedia page recounting his biography. And the biography keeps growing. Each Wikipedia page summarizes the previous books, recounting different adventures from different stages of his life, up to this latest exile, when, already widowed, he emigrates to Costa Rica with Doña Sofía and lives near the border in Bahía de Salinas, working as security for a small hotel, though in practice he is almost the hotel’s manager in Puerto Soley.
The setting of the novel is the murder of a Nicaraguan magnate aboard a luxury sailboat that ends up stranded in the Pacific waters of Costa Rica, near where Inspector Morales is living. Where did that boat come from?
The boat came to me one morning while I was in San Juan del Sur, facing the sea. I woke up and saw a sailboat anchored in the bay. It immediately caught my attention, and the name of the sailboat was Sea Cloud. I began investigating what it was doing there and discovered that it was a luxury sailboat that made stops in different parts of the Pacific, sometimes in the Caribbean, sometimes traveling to Europe, one of those high-end sailing vessels, as they say, for wealthy clients, truly rich passengers. Then came my biggest surprise: the Sea Cloud had once been the Angelita, the yacht owned by the Trujillo family. A group of American millionaires bought it from Generalissimo Trujillo, and Ramfis Trujillo, which is why the novel is called The Curse of Ramfis, turned it into a floating cabaret.
All the great Hollywood stars passed through that yacht, from Frank Sinatra to Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Ava Gardner, and Rita Hayworth, during the lavish parties held on board. And when Trujillo was assassinated, Ramfis fled the country after looting the Central Bank. They loaded crates of cash into the ship’s hold alongside Trujillo’s corpse and sailed for Europe. But in the Atlantic, the Portuguese navy intercepted the vessel and forced it to turn back, beginning the ship’s long wandering from port to port, with no one willing to let it dock, until Trujillo was finally buried in Spain, in the very same cemetery where General Francisco Franco is now buried.
We are not going to go into the details of that murder or how Inspector Morales uncovers the killer, because readers deserve the chance to discover that for themselves by reading the novel. But what can be said is that through that yacht, and around that crime, recent Nicaraguan history also unfolds, along with other kinds of crimes: money laundering, migrant smuggling, and the kinds of things happening day by day in Nicaragua.
Of course, because in the novel the yacht departs from San Juan del Sur, but it is not carrying ordinary passengers. It has been privately chartered. Just imagine how many millions it costs for the exclusive use of a single family or a small group of businessmen. And this Nicaraguan businessman, who is tied to the regime, charters it for a voyage that, after stopping at a Caribbean island, is supposed to end in Venezuela. That is the story the reader will gradually unravel.
The people aboard that yacht may remind Nicaraguan readers of figures connected in some way to events in Nicaragua. But this is a novel that will also be read in Spain and throughout Latin America. How do you make universal a story that is rooted in such local and specific events?
The local has to be transformed into something universal by telling people stories that could happen before their own eyes or that could belong to their own environment. And what is common to someone living in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Brazil, Spain, or France? Money laundering, human trafficking, the business of migration. All of that is part of today’s news agenda, and therefore these are very common elements that become part of a very specific plot aboard this yacht, where the crime takes place and which the reader will follow step by step throughout the novel.
And after Inspector Dolores Morales discovers who committed the crime, what lies ahead for him in the Nicaragua we live in today, which seems like a tunnel with no exit, even though change in Nicaragua will inevitably come? Could Inspector Morales one day investigate crimes against humanity among the ruins of the dictatorship? What will Inspector Morales do tomorrow?
His fate is tied to the political fate of the country. If he remains in exile, then another case will find him in exile. If there is change in Nicaragua, he will return to Nicaragua and reopen his investigative office. This is a character governed by reality. As a contemporary character, he cannot escape reality.
Some of the characters who accompany him are really memories, people who are no longer in this world but remain with him.
Like Lord Dixon, who is always by his side. Lord Dixon was killed in the first novel (The Sky Weeps for Me) during a shootout with hitmen and drug traffickers in Managua. But he has become a kind of voice of conscience for Inspector Morales, always whispering in his ear. Sometimes he says very funny things, very sharp things. He mocks him, argues with him. In truth, there are two voices Inspector Morales listens to: Lord Dixon’s and the advice of Doña Sofía (Smith), who is always helping him keep his feet on the ground.
After finishing The Curse of Ramfis, are you currently working on another literary project? Are you writing another book?
I am writing another book that is scheduled to come out next year (2027). It is my childhood memoir. The book will be titled Family Portrait with Volcano, and it tells the story of my Ramírez family and my Mercado family, which was a very large family. It is called Portrait with Volcano because in my hometown, Masatepe, you can see the Santiago volcano from any street. It stands as a kind of protective shadow over the town.
What I still remember most vividly from my childhood is hearing, in the darkness before dawn, in the middle of the night, the rumblings of that volcano like distant cannon fire, and then seeing it again at daybreak as though nothing had happened, always with its eternal plume of smoke. The shadow of that volcano, which has always accompanied me, is what shapes the book. I am going to tell the story of my childhood through the intertwined stories of my grandparents, great-grandparents, and uncles, up until the moment I leave to study at the University of León. The next book I would write would be about my years after arriving in León to attend university. I still have that project in mind, but this book, Family Portrait with Volcano, is already simmering. It has advanced quite a lot, and I am now working on the third revision. It is what will be published next year
