It is based on the premise that to every literary work fits different writing strategies that this dissertation takes a reading of the portuguese novel Balada da praia dos cães. With the purpose of identifying how the creative workshop of the author José Cardoso Pires works in this specific case, it has been carried out a mapping that seeks to understand the various formal procedures used in the framework of the writing of this book. For such purpose are analyzed both structural aspects (its construction of narrative layers, its variation in the records and the narrative voices) as much as of the plot (its choice for a police thematic and its rapprochement with the logic of the historical novel). The goal, as well as to deepen the reading and understanding of the author and of this novel, is reconnecting, even minimally, the literary studies of its matter par excellence, the works of fiction, from the relationship between the time of creative writing and its consummation in readings.