A great character like Caldas could only come from a great person like Villar

Those of us who order the library marked by some particular vice, such as crime novels, usually have a problem when it comes to classifying some books, some authors.

Poetry is poetry and prose is prose, there is no discussion there.

But the noir novel sometimes climbs another pedestal and some detective author ends up sneaking onto the shelves of the narrative as if he had come to life and had done it on his own, without human intervention, without any decision.

It happens to me with Benjamin Black (impossible to separate from his real name, John Banville, even more so when the borders between one and the other are blurring) and it just happened to me with Domingo Villar.

Today I looked for his books and they were not on the black shelves, as I thought, but on the main altar of narrative, along with Ida Vitale.

More information

Domingo Villar dies, the quiet man who revolutionized the Spanish black novel

It is not time to compare.

But it is time to recognize that if Domingo Villar had escaped to that place on his account, he had his reasons.

What he had achieved in

especially, was what so many seek and few find: to transcend, to remain, to generate a world in which —just like him on my shelf— the rest of us also come to life because in them there are much more than plot, atmosphere, descriptions and twists that can be found in so many books.

In theirs there is soul.

Leo Caldas, his great character, could be more or less effective, sad, ironic, intelligent, but he was (is) above all a frank spirit with which to live.

Because, who would want to stay and live with Philip Marlowe, with Poirot or with Kurt Wallander, with those tortured, wounded detectives, incapable of any happiness, or with other savvy ones like Miss Marple?

Who would want a being omnipotent in the face of crime, powerless in the face of life?

Caldas, however, along the lines of Camilleri's Montalbano and some other Mediterraneans, was someone to love, to care for, to approach in life or in death to have a joy before succumbing to the darkness of crimes. .

Far from that Mediterranean Sea that has brought together the characters of Montalbano, his teacher Carvalho or Kostas Jaritos de Markaris, in that Vigo estuary that is surly before the harsh Atlantic and warm even in the most unexpected moments, Leo Caldas has projected his own ecosystem in which the villages, the old houses, the winding streets, the ferries that cross again and again the estuary lashed by the rain and the slippery pavements come to life as much as the old people who inhabit them, the giant mysteries inside each dwelling, of each family and of each one of its members.

And if I think and write about Leo Caldas it is because I don't think about Domingo Villar, whose death is too hard for those of us who love him.

Creating a great character like Caldas is only possible from a great person like Domingo.

Not everyone can do it.

Warm, cultured, so generous that he was glad from the bottom of his heart that they gave you an award even if it meant he lost it.

I remember so many good details that this is perhaps nonsense, but it portrays him: in July 2020, at Gijón's Black Week, before the two entered the scene my mask broke and he ran out to buy another with such speed that it arrived with it brand new in hand almost before I knew it.

That was Sunday.

The postcard he wrote me then to say goodbye has been stuck in my closet for two years, in plain view every time I write.

Which is every day.

Generosity,

loyalty, quality.

Human and professional, if both things can coexist separately.

Domingo, who suffered so much from the death of his father that he had to put his last novel on hold for years, today has jumped to another place.

May the memory of him escalate and his literature escalate, as his books jumped, rightly so, off the shelf.

Because Villar was one of those rare authors capable of elevating the genre in which he worked to literature in capital letters.

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