«I am not an educated man. My father was a foreman of that winery that is seen from here and I only went to school for a few days (...) I am a man with a certain common sense and nothing more. What I've done so far are fudge, just fudge . This is how Manuel González is recognized, by everyone known as Plinio, Head of the Municipal Guard of Tomelloso. It is this man of waking up at eight, smoking a lot and having a glass of Chinchón that his wife extends to face the day while she wears the well-ironed blue uniform and puts on “black shoes about to patent leather”. Breakfast without fail at the buñolería de la Rocío, where he takes the pulse in the morning attentive to what is said, talk to the preacher if he tends and throws another Celts.

Pliny, when he doubts or turns around the case in question, usually scratches his head, raises his cap and clears his throat . Or he hooks his thumbs in his belt. Or a bit of everything.

In Tomelloso everyone knows each other. They cross in the Casino of San Fernando, in the bars or on the street, Braulio the philosopher, the paragraph Mr. Pio, Bonifacio the sheriff, the judge, the Pharaoh (ready for any joke, "always seems freshly finished eating" ), Calixto the sculptor, Albadalejo the photographer, the police assistants Anacleto and Maleza ... and Don Lotario, a local veterinarian, owner of several farms and, above all, the right hand of the policeman in his research. Something like Dr. Watson de La Mancha , who listens, advises or accompanies Sherlock Holmes of that town of Ciudad Real in the last years of Franco.

García Pavón's novels were very popular in the 60s and 70s. Plinio even had a Spanish Television series in 1972, already recorded in color, in which José Luis Garci and Antonio Giménez Rico participated and with music by Carmelo Bernaola. Antonio Casal played the policeman and the bureaucrat (and with a bow tie) Alfonso del Real played Don Lotario. His novel The Kingdom of Witiza received the Critics' Award in 1968 and the popular The Red Sisters , the Nadal the following year. The writer was born on September 24, 1919 in Tomelloso, where he studied the Baccalaureate and spent the Civil War. Already in Madrid, he received a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Letters with a thesis on Clarín, was a professor at the School of Dramatic Arts, directed the Taurus publishing house from 1960 to 1970 and was a regular speaker at Café Gijón .

The substance of the books that Francisco García Pavón wrote with Plinio as the protagonist is not only in how the municipality solves the case, but in the conversations that these Don Quijote and Sancho of the twentieth century have while they walk or take a Valdepeñas in a cellar. Other characters, or the voice that handles the book like a puppet, drop phrases that occur or bewildering . In The red sisters you can read: «Love is a cover, a hiccup, a congestion of the head or the lower belly, which lasts less than a Saturday»; «The Spaniard has a lot of imagination to save the moment, none to change the way»; or "Here we are all right and with the newly sold wine."

«Plinio investigates from murders to theft of hams, from suicides to disappearances or apparitions where he does not play. And it does so in a rural environment, where the landscape, which is changing with the progress of the tractors, influences the day-to-day life of the extraordinary secondary characters that dot their novels ». This was written by Paco Camarasa, that long-awaited bookseller of Negra y Criminal, in his book Sangre en las shelntes (Destino).

In García Pavón's novels, picaresque and cachaza shake hands. There are times when you take everything to chacota and others, of course, more funerals. The cars of line alternate with "periodiqueros" of the Case , telephone booths and domino evenings. And some trip to Madrid, as in The Red Sisters , a novel in which in the past adjusts accounts with the capital and the new times: «Since Madrid has become so great, it has lost its joy. Now people think well - and they already believe it until the last monkey . He doesn't go to the bars and bars with lights and voices. They prefer elegant places of very little light, with couples sticking and come to drink whiskey, which is worth a kidney and tastes like an old shoe ». Far away that Madrid from Tomelloso where, as Braulio the philosopher considers: «For three things, the wise men are known: by the way of drinking wine, looking at women and rolling cigars ...».

In the TVE program This is my land of 1983, which brought together the luster tomelloseros (the painter and very shy Antonio López and the poets Félix Grande and Eladio Cabañero), García Pavón commented that the first story in which Plinio took letters in the matter it came to him by the history that a mayor of the town narrated to him in which a policeman appeared «with insight and special malice. I told it as is. The name of Pliny perhaps came from a very fat Latin teacher and whose hands were very sweaty and his name was Pliny .

Francisco Umbral was told, in an interview for the newspaper Already in August 1969: «I arrived at the novel without feeling it. One summer I sat down and started writing and I got a somewhat police novel, Witiza's reign . With the same ease and speed I wrote The Rapture of the Sabines ».

The words that he drops, here and there, García Pavón in his books and that he heard as a child, also clash at the reader. His daughter, professor and philologist Sonia García Soubriet has tracked and documented them in the Francisco García Pavón Dictionary (Soubriet Editions). «He always admired his imagination to invent words, turns and, above all, to create a humor that he defined 'between erotic and funeral'. He feared that as a result of phenomena such as emigration, television, access to a greater culture coupled with the disappearance of such traditional ways of life, these peculiarities would eventually be lost. Along with phrases such as: "There was a pause, paito de pito liao, gout, sucking, licking and expellence of fumes", words (many) such as pesquesición (inquiry), pesamero (those who are going to give their condolences), very bad (which she is very busty), to disguise (open her eyes), rebatillo (sudden feeling or hunch) ... And so on.

Plinio's method of work is cast by García Pavón de Rondón several times. In the reign of Witiza he says to his agent: «I don't like help [referring to the" hounds "of the Criminal Investigation Brigade], that what I like is to cook in my kitchen, with my spices and pans (...) Do you think I could be such a good cop, as you say I am, if I only based on what I see and hear? There's another thing. Something similar to what they say makes the artists ' hearts tremble ».

Professor Santos Sanz Villanueva , a student of the author, believes that García Pavón «occupies a very prominent place in the history of the Spanish postwar story. Storyteller himself with testimonial pieces of a renovating costumbrismo, when the story was held as second-class literature, he campaigned for the recovery of the story as an independent genre and of its own merit. He prepared an anthology of contemporary Spanish storytellers , a reference work ».

Now the complete works have just been edited in four volumes, some 3,300 pages, by the Fourth Centenary publishing house. In a recovered prologue, García Pavón made clear his intentions as a writer, without any petulance: «[They are] novels with enough suspension for the superficial reader who only wants to excite his nerves and the necessary height so that the sensitive reader does not they will fall from his hands ». Bit much? More than enough.

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