It was based on a book of the same name by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, one of a series of novels that featured the character of a hard-boiled detective called Pepe Carvalho.

[2] Asesinato en el Comité Central was Aranda's first work shot in Madrid instead of his native Barcelona.

The lights are back on a few seconds later, but in that short span of time the Secretary General, Fernando Garrido, is killed, stabbed in the chest.

Santos, the interim new leader of the Communist Party, calls in a private investigator, Pepe Carvalho.

Carvalho interviews a former CIA chief who is severely handicapped after losing his arms and legs in Vietnam, but the wheelchair-using old man refuses to co-operate.

Because the crime took place in a short period of time and in darkness, Carvalho's suspicions quickly narrow to five members of the Communist Party: Sepúlveda, Esparza Julvé, Pérez Montesa, Leverder and Ordoñez.

Garrido's last photograph and the examination of the items he was carrying when he was killed leads Carvalho to the conclusion that it was an insignia of a harmonica he was wearing on his lapel that helped the killer find his target in the dark.

Esparza Julvé, a protégé of both Garrido and Santos, has been experiencing severe economic hardship, and while on a trip to Germany was contacted by CIA agents who hired him to kill the communist leader for money.

Carvalho confirms the identity of the killer, forcing the handicapped man to reveal what he knows by filling his mouth with bullets and pushing his wheelchair out into the street among traffic.

At a new meeting of the Central Committee, Esparza Julvé is cast aside by the members of the Communist Party who are now aware of his culpability.

[4] Aranda had been approached, shortly before, about adapting another novel by Vázquez Montalbán: The South Seas, but he declined.

[2] He found the protagonist of the novel very unpleasant: "I detest Carvalho's morals, his cynicism, the use he makes of women..

The director's idea was to use the plot as a chronicle of the transition, the period during which Spain moved from Francisco Franco's dictatorship, after his death, until the first free election that put the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party in power.

Much of the film's action is filtered through headlines and television reports in imitation of the way in which the Spanish public lived the transition.

[3] The televised funeral of the Communist leader is a sly montage of mourners at the funeral of Franco, while La Pasionaria (the legendary Spanish Communist leader who passed dictatorship in exile in the Soviet Union) appears as a senile old dear who sits next to the victim but does not even realize he is dead.

As the interior minister exclaims: In the same way that we’ve had to forget everything, you should to the same” [3] Aranda omitted all the part that occurred in Barcelona, starting the film with the arrival of the detective at Madrid's airport.

Victoria Abril, on her third collaboration with Aranda, plays Carmela a militant communist who serves as Carvalho's driver.

The detective has been played previously by Carlos Ballesteros in Bigas Luna's film, Tatuaje, in 1977 and in the series on Spanish television by actor Eusebio Poncela.