Disappearance of Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, the Brazilian "Simenon"

Text by: Annie Gasnier Follow

He was one of the most famous contemporary Brazilian authors, awarded for his detective novels. This native of Rio had, between the sea and the hills of Copacabana, renewed the style of the thriller in Brazil.

Publicity

The Silence of the Rain was the title of his first novel, the one that had revealed a new 60-year-old writer to the general public. And it was in the silence of a carioca autumn day, in a city of Rio where the population lives confined, that Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza died at the age of 84, after several months of hospitalization. His funeral, in these pandemic times , took place in the strictest of privacy.

However, he leaves behind thousands of orphans. His readers of course, and especially his creature, Commissioner Espinosa. Retired professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), where he will have taught philosophy and psychoanalysis for 35 years, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza published his first novel in 1996. He gave his emblematic character the name of the famous philosopher Spinoza , Espinosa in Portuguese.

Espinosa, carioca investigator

In the 11 novels where he appears, this delegado is a fascinating character, like the commissioner Maigret by Georges Simenon. He works in Rio de Janeiro, in the heart of Copacabana, and likes to go home on foot, browsing in a sebo, a secondhand book shop, before finding his apartment in the small Peixoto district, hidden on the heights of the tourist area, and its beautiful Ines.

His character has nothing of the stereotypes of the carioca middle class (inhabitant of Rio), but his investigations touch the depths and the social misery of an idealized seaside city . The writer, like the charismatic professor, had known how to seduce his readers as his former students who flocked to his lessons. We almost scrambled to buy the new adventures of its commissioner.

"  Espinosa is an investigator who does not know everything, he is like his reader,  " explains one of Garcia Roza's former colleagues, a professor of Brazilian literature who is also a writer. “  And the two walk together, full of doubts, hesitations, in a formidable psychoanalytic scenario. It is a subtle and new narrative technique in the detective novel  ”, completes Godofredo de Oliveira Neto, recalling all the works published by this great specialist in psychoanalysis.

A writer compared to Georges Simenon or Raymond Chandler

Undoubtedly the most disturbing investigation is Perseguido , published in France under the title of The strange case of Dr. Nesse , or Na multidão ("In the crowd”) Which is not yet translated.

Only six of Espinosa's surveys were translated and published in France, by Actes Sud, from 2004.

Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza had been honored with the Prix Jabuti, the Brazilian Goncourt, from his first novel. He was compared to the Belgian Georges Simenon, or to the American Raymond Chandler, his elders in the thriller literature. Three of his works have been successfully brought to the screen by Brazilian filmmakers.

For his latest novel, published while he was already hospitalized, this always elegant and considerate man had chosen an almost premonitory title: A última mulher ("The last woman"). 

Newsletter With the Daily Newsletter, find the headlines directly in your mailbox

Follow all international news by downloading the RFI application

• Brazil
• Literature
• Culture
• our selection

On the same subject

International reporting

Brazil: the arrival of the coronavirus in the favelas worries

Great report

Brazil: the favelas funk criminalized

Coronavirus: Brazilian justice prohibits the government from advocating non-containment