General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20269 min read

Crímenes Ejemplares

Crímenes ejemplares is a book of hyperbrief narrative fictions by the Spanish-Mexican writer Max Aub (1903–1972), first published in Mexico in the 1950s, in which each piece presents a murder, suicide or epitaph in a few lines of deadpan first-person confession. The Balcells literary agency describes it as one of the great classics of Spanish microfiction, a trivialization of killing filled with black humor.¹ Aub (Paris, 1903 – Mexico City, 1972) was a playwright, novelist and essayist exiled in Mexico after the Spanish Civil War.²

Key fact	Detail
Author	Max Aub, Hispano-Mexican writer (1903–1972)³
First editions	Crímenes ejemplares y otros, Finisterre, Mexico, 1956; Crímenes ejemplares, Impresora Juan Pablos, Mexico, 1957, 66 pp.⁴^•⁵
Final structure	Four sections: Crímenes; De suicidios; De gastronomía; and Epitafios¹
Form	Microfiction: crimes confessed in a few lines, sometimes in four words⁶
Translations	French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Turkish, and a partial English translation (1967)⁵
Adaptations	Short films by Mariano Barroso (1983) and Carlos Grau (2005), theater productions in Spain, and stop-motion animation (2023, 2025)⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot

A prison cell. A man behind bars narrates how he came to commit the crime that put him there, speaking in the flat, reasonable tone of someone presenting a legal defense. He walks the audience step by step through his reasoning as though any sensible person would have reached the same conclusion. The animation gives his voice a body and a face, and lets his self-satisfaction play across it without softening the joke.

The crime, when he finally arrives at it, is that he shot a man for endlessly stirring his coffee. That is the entire payload, and the film spends its two minutes calibrating it: an irritation so microscopic that, once the narrator's voice gets hold of it, apparently becomes sufficient grounds for homicide. The confession format does the real work, because a man explaining his way to murder over a spoon against a cup is funnier and colder than the act itself could ever be. The narration has the structure of a legal defense and the content of a tantrum, and the gap between the two is where the laughs live.

The ending gives no redemption and no lesson. The narrator is not sorry and does not know he should be; the final beat leaves him exactly as self-possessed as he began. The word "exemplary" in the title is doing ironic labor: the crime is presented as a model case, a how-to, in the tradition of Aub's stories, which withhold guilt the way a bureaucracy withholds an apology. The short is less a story than a thesis delivered at gunpoint: the criminal impulse needs no monster, only a person with a grievance and a vocabulary of justification.

Characters

The narrator (voice role) is the film's only character and its entire engine: a prisoner who believes his logic was sound, rationalizing with perfect comfort inside a human voice. His culpability has been quietly subtracted from his own arithmetic, and he never notices.

The victim exists only in the narration: a man with a coffee and a spoon, whose small, maddening habit is described with the gravity of an atrocity.

Interpretations and controversies

The film's satire has an obvious lineage. Aub's source book, first published in 1957 during his exile in Mexico, is divided into four sections, Crímenes, De suicidios, De gastronomía, and Epitafios, and its stories treat murder as a solved equation¹⁷. Scholarship has noted that across its three lifetime editions Aub planted clues in the paratexts pointing at the Franco regime, the Cold War, and the events of 1968 in Mexico and Paris¹⁸, so readers of the source may read the short's nameless, guilt-free narrator as part of that same tradition of tyranny rendered as caricature. The short itself names its target, a world where guilt has been uninstalled, more cleanly than it probes it; at two minutes there is no second movement to test the narrator's logic against anything outside his own head.

The book and its form

The pieces are written as confessions of others, or stories overheard, in which murderers explain their acts with motives that are trivial, absurd or absent. The opening example quoted in a 2009 exhibition catalog reads: "Lo maté porque me dolía la cabeza. Y él venga hablar, sin parar, sin descanso, de cosas que me tenían completamente sin cuidado... Creo que es un atenuante muy de tenerse en cuenta" (I killed him because my head hurt, and he kept talking nonstop about things I did not care about at all; I think that is a mitigating circumstance well worth considering).³ Another piece closes with the four words "No lo hice adrede" (I did not do it on purpose).⁶

A festival catalog description of one adaptation summarizes the premise: the crimes are inspired by testimonies that describe murders directly, individual confessions of people who have nothing in common except that each has committed an assassination.⁹ The Calambur edition's presentation notes the literary feat involved: placing a whole narrative in very few lines, with an economy of text that still uses every voice the story needs, and a sarcasm that describes the unbearable victim better than the murderer.⁶

Repetition and variation. A scholarly survey of Hispanic microfiction identifies the Crímenes ejemplares as a collection of hyperbrief texts in which difference and repetition are the fundamental creative engine and the key to reading: the reader internalizes the mechanism of appreciating what differs from what is identical. Although the microtext was not yet formulated as a genre when Aub wrote, his "crimes" are now read as such and appear in anthologies of hyperbrief fiction, but each piece reaches its full meaning in the context of the book, in function of the others that form its system.¹⁰

Publication history

The book's textual history is unusually layered. The Cervantes Institute bibliography records Crímenes ejemplares y otros (Serie Mil y una), published by Finisterre in Mexico in 1956,⁴ while the Max Aub Foundation bibliography records Crímenes ejemplares, Impresora Juan Pablos, Mexico, 1957, 66 pages, reproducing most of the pieces integrated into "Zarzuela" in Sala de Espera, with vignettes.⁵ A piece titled "Nuevos crímenes ejemplares" appeared in the pulp magazine Selecciones policíacas y de misterio in February 1958.⁵

In 1968 Aub issued a revised edition in which he added several new "crímenes ejemplares", suppressed twenty-three, and added the shorter series "Suicidios", "De gastronomía" and "Epitafios"; later editions have gathered all the texts of both versions.¹⁰ Spanish editions followed from 1968 onward, including a Lumen edition (1972), Calambur (1991, with a prologue by Eduardo Haro Tecglen, reissued and expanded in 1996 and 2011), Espasa-Calpe (1999), the illustrated Media Vaca/Fundación Max Aub edition (2001), Thule (2005), Libros del Zorro Rojo (2015, with illustrations by Liniers), Verbum (2019), and a critical edition by Pedro Tejada with illustrations by Pedro Arjona (Reino de Cordelia, 2020, 453 pages) that added 12 crimes, 3 suicides and 7 epitaphs new.⁵

Translations

The book has circulated widely in translation. A partial English translation by Keith Botsford, "Some exemplary crimes", appeared in the Quarterly Review of Literature in 1967. The complete French translation by Danièle Guibbert, Crimes exemplaires, was published in Paris in 1980 and reissued in 1990 and 1997. Italian versions include a partial translation by Dario Puccini (1969) and Lucrezia Panunzio Cipriani's Delitti esemplari (Sellerio, Palermo, 1981, reissued 2010). Thomas Brons's German version appeared as 80 Seiten 60 Morde (Berlin, 1992). Portuguese translations were published in Lisbon (1982, 2001) and São Paulo (2003), and Turkish translations in Istanbul in 1993, 2000 and 2019.⁵

Adaptations

Film. The stories have attracted filmmakers from early in their history. Mariano Barroso, later a feature director, made two 35 mm color shorts in 1983, Crímenes ejemplares I and Crímenes ejemplares II, free adaptations of the tales, five minutes each.⁷ In 1988 the Italian Delitti esemplari, directed by Luca Alcini and Pietro Bontempo after the Sellerio edition, won first prize at the Festival Internazionale Cinema Giovanni di Torino.⁷ Carlos Grau directed Los crímenes ejemplares de Max Aub (2005), a 35 mm fiction short with a large cast including Óscar Jaenada, Terele Pávez, Paul Naschy, and Achero Mañas; the ICAA film registry records it as 12 minutes, certified on 21 October 2005 and rated not recommended for audiences under 13,¹¹ while the Huesca festival catalog and IMDb list it as 10 minutes.¹² The short later appeared as an extra on the limited Blu-ray edition of Ceremonia Sangrienta (2021).¹³

Animation. The book has proven suited to stop-motion. Un crimen ejemplar (2023), a two-minute stop-motion black comedy by Ignasi Tarruella produced by Produccions Quart, adapts the story of a man who, narrating from prison, explains that he shot a man who kept stirring his coffee without stopping.⁸ The same director's studio presented 4Crims at Weird Market 2025, a stop-motion short adapting four micro-stories from the book as independent episodes linked by the theme of death: four violent, absurd and unjustified murders.¹⁴

Theater and visual art. Stage versions have been mounted in Europe and America.¹ In 2009 a collective of 32 young designers and animators exhibited 32 illustrations in Guadalajara, one per participant, reinterpreting the crimes described by Aub; the exhibition grew out of the "Batallón 52" animation project.³ In 2024 MyH Producciones staged Crímenes ejemplares at the Festival 7 Villas in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, a 90-minute black-comedy production with live piano that asked how far society's limits had moved since Aub wrote.¹⁵

Reception

Aub's granddaughter, María Teresa Álvarez Aub, recalled the book in a 2025 radio interview for its diverting tone, alongside Campo de los almendros and Las buenas intenciones, arguing that his work remains entirely current.¹⁶ The Balcells agency notes that the producer Portfolio holds an option on the film rights and that the volume's four-section structure has supported its continued adaptation.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Animated and short films › Individual short films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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