As far as picaresque novels go, La desordenada codicia de los bienes agenos (The Inordinate Greed for the Goods of Others, 1619) is a rather heterogeneous work, and its author, Dr. Carlos Garcia, is one of the most obscure and elusive writers of the Spanish Golden Age. Only two books by Garcia are known to have survived: La oposicion y conjuncion de los dos grandes luminares de la Tierra (The Opposition and Conjunction of the Earth’s Two Great Luminaries, 1617) and the novel that is the object of study of this chapter. The former, full of witticisms and rhetorical flourishes, is an essay of sorts that attempts to poke fun at and shed some light on the traditional rivalry existing between Spain and France, the country where Garcia resided most of his adult life. The latter is an intricate narrative that provides one of the few links between the Spanish picaresque novel and the British tradition of rogue pamphlets in the Elizabethan period, with which Garcia was undoubtedly familiar via French-language versions of such works.

Despite notable efforts by various Hispanists, particularly in the twentieth century, not much is known about Garcia’s life, large portions of which still remain in the shadows. His biography is shrouded in such mystery that some scholars have gone as far as to question his very existence, while others have proposed that his name may have been just a pseudonym for a much more renowned author, with candidates including none other than Miguel de Cervantes himself. It surely did not help that his Desordenada codicia met with much more success abroad than in Spain, which is due in part to the fact that it was published in Paris. French, English, and Dutch translations soon circulated widely in the seventeenth century, while the original Spanish text was not reprinted until 1877, and the first scholarly annotated edition did not appear until the 1970s. This is ample proof of the obscurity of both the novel and its author, whose doctorate was even called into question by some critics.

However, the discovery of a handful of references to a Dr. Carlos Garcia – medical specialization as yet unknown – in seventeenth-century works and documents proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that our author did exist and that he did compose the two books that were published under his name.