Chronicle of black Spain: the keys to the height of the criminal novel

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They no longer wear raincoats, or Fedora hats, nor their natural habitat are those dark slums where smoke, whiskey and jazz reigned. Nor do they speak with the magnetic disdain of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, nor are they exclusively men, nor women, fatal.

Private detectives and police inspectors from Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, where the black genre established its stylistic codes, have been giving way in recent times to police officers, mossos d'esquadra and Civil Guard agents, at less in the tables of novelties of the Spanish bookstores. At the same pace as the frontiers of criminal fiction widened, an audience interested in crime and its circumstances described by authors here has grown. Something that, more than a passing heyday, is an editorial phenomenon with signs of enduring over time.

One of the references of a good part of the current Spanish authors of criminal fiction is Lorenzo Silva . The author of the impatient alchemist and curator of the festival Getafe Black has become the Civil Guards Bevilacqua and Chamorro characters indispensable to understanding the evolution of gender at national level and final emergence in the Spanish publishing scene. “I see a plurality, a diversity of looks and a quantity of black novel written by Spanish authors that the current moment is absolutely incomparable with 20 years ago , when I started publishing,” admits Silva. «At that time it was considered a marginal genre, even for the reader ... and let's not say for criticism. I think we have never had so many good black novel writers working at the same time in our country.

We have never had so many good black novel writers working at the same time in our country

One of those responsible for the growing weight of women in the genre, both commercially and narratively, is Dolores Redondo , which this week has launched The North Face of the Heart (Destination), expected prequel to the Baztán trilogy. After winning the Planet Award with All this I will give you , Redondo begins a new cycle of novels inspired by the north, in its metaphorical and geographical sense. «I am a woman from the north, it is my inner stage. All my published novels, the ones I kept in the drawer and the 10 that I have in my head, are incursions into that dark, mythical and inaccessible face that we all carry in our hearts, ”says Redondo. «I am an explorer of that north face, in which it always rains, in which it is always cold and in which it is always at night, as in Baztán».

The return to the conflicting family origins of the character who has given him fame, the insightful Foral Police Amaia Salazar , intermingle with his training with the FBI and the case of a slippery serial killer who takes advantage of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina to make yours. In the author's opinion, “the black and criminal novel has finally found the place within the reading preferences of our country that it should have always had, the one it occupies in other countries and that, for different reasons, had not reached give yourself here The opening that was the success of this type of novels that came from other latitudes opened the way for many Spanish authors to get down to work.

In his case, it is also clear that the boundaries of the genre have been definitively blurred, giving way to a growing influence of fantastic elements and narrative tropes of the Anglo-Saxon thriller . «I recognize it, I like miscegenations: between genres, cultures, concepts and people. I think that the author's freedom to cross margins liberalizes the black novel, making it reach a type of reader who would not look at the pure genre.

Lorenzo Silva establishes the solid foundations of the current Spanish criminal fiction in the novels of Francisco García Pavón - of which the centenary of his birth was celebrated two weeks ago - and in those of the usual suspect quartet formed by Juan Madrid, Francisco González Ledesma, Andreu Martín and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán .

Among young people, those called to pick up the smoking gun, Lorenzo Silva points to Claudio Cerdán, Susana Hernández or Cristina Morales , authors who may not enter fully into the canons of the genre but who use criminal elements to tell their stories. "I am interested in that look about the violence and the cracks in society that young people are not very well known but very talented."

The author's freedom to cross margins liberalizes the black novel

There are also those who doubt that there is a boom, both in terms of sales and quality. This is the case of Juan Salvador López , from the Madrid bookstore specialized in black genre Study in Scarlet. «What is published mainly and what sells the most, with an overwhelming percentage, are Anglo-Saxon, American and British authors. Nor do the Nordics sell so much, much less the Spaniards, ”he says. Of course, there are established authors who never fail, such as Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Carlos Zanón or Domingo Villar , and others who have been hitting on a commercial level such as Juan Gómez-Jurado , who will shortly publish Loba negra (Editions B). "They are writers who follow American schemes, both at the level of narration and characters and even marketing and promotion."

Barcelona's Laura Gomara , who has already demonstrated her original approach to the genre with her first novel, They come badly given , presents these days In the blood (both edited by Roca), "an update on the figure of the fatal woman, which has traditionally been narrated almost always from the eyes of a man, ”he explains.

If in her first raid she was the protagonist of a young multi-employed woman who lives on the threshold of poverty, In the blood she is told from the point of view of a girl with two races who feeds her luxurious life train thanks to her skills as a pickpocket . In both cases, these are sophisticated narrative vehicles to show, among other things, «the unsustainable price of rentals, vital precariousness, mass tourism, the expulsion of citizens to the periphery or the various Barcelonas in which we live» .

For Gomara, Spanish criminal fiction, beyond variations and specific deviations, has some common hallmarks. «The society we portray is the same, we share history, context. There may be nuances and people tend to magnify the differences, but the black novel written in Spain, whether in Spanish, Catalan, Galician or Basque, shares themes because it shares society ». Here we have the txapela noir , a term coined by Jesús Palacios to refer to the Basque black novel, the wild Canaries of Alexis Ravelo or the misty Galicia of Domingo Villar , all of them different expressions of a shared reality.

One of the first publishers to bet exclusively on national authors was Alrevés. Born a decade ago in Barcelona, ​​she specialized in publishing black novels in Spanish and Catalan and has functioned as a quarry of writers where already established figures of the genre such as Victor del Arbol or Alexis Ravelo himself had their first opportunity. «When we started it was a niche. It was unthinkable that a publishing house was dedicated one hundred percent to edit Spanish authors. However, now it is a more common thing and big stamps are also betting on them. It is an upward trend, ”says Gregori Dolz , co-founder of the publishing house. This trend has paralleled the emergence of specialized festivals: from the Black Week of Gijón, the only one of its category three decades ago, we have gone to about twenty appointments.

Among the causes of this phenomenon, Dolz's diagnosis indicates that, in a country marked in the last decade by political corruption and the economic crisis, "the black novel tends to make this connection with social reality very clear" and allows us to see our reflection in many of the losers that populate criminal fiction. For Silva, “they are stories that have a very clear engine and that appeal to the darkest areas of the human condition. There are those who see it as something necessary in terms of self-knowledge and there are those who simply like morbidity and enjoy the sleazy and bad things that happen to others ».

Vázquez Montalbán also offered his dose of wisdom to anyone who knew how to listen. "In times of crisis of certainties and dogmas, what would become of us without metaphors and without vices?" And there are few genres, to say none, as plagued with metaphors and vices as the noir.

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