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Martin Servaz returns, the French policeman with the finest intuition and lousy aim

2022-06-09T10:42:26.054Z


With 'Sisters', the fifth installment in the saga of the Toulouse commissioner, the writer Bernard Minier plays with the reader with the background of a new crime


There is not necessarily a secret formula for it, but from time to time, it happens: the character born in the mind of a writer goes beyond the limits of his imagination to become the property of his readers, who feel like someone real with whom they laugh and suffer.

Bernard Minier (Béziers, 61 years old) has achieved it with Martin Servaz, the commander of the finest intuition and lousy aim of the Toulouse judicial police responsible for his late but dazzling success in the French crime novel since he published

Under the ice

in 2011. The fifth installment of Servaz and its also atypical team of investigators,

Sisters

, arrives in Spain this Thursday from the Salamandra publishing house, ready to surprise readers with its twists and turns to a plot that, with Minier, is never linear or simple.

Of course, the scene of the crime is repeated over and over again: the city of Toulouse and the region that extends south of the town bathed by the Garonne River to the Pyrenees that Minier, who grew up in a small town at the foot of the mountain chain, knows like the back of his hand.

"I like those authors who have their own fictional territory, their universe," explains the writer with his mind set on the Swedish city of Ystad, where Henning Mankel's Inspector Wallander lives, or on Michael Connelly's Los Angeles and even the county William Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha.

In the case of Minier, an avid reader who is moved by both Thomas Mann and Jo Nesbø and who devours literature from all periods and genres (“I am a literary pig,” he laughs in stupendous Spanish), that universe of his own has his epicenter in Toulouse, where he studied medicine for two years before dedicating himself, for the next quarter of a century, to work as a customs inspector.

Until the success of Servaz, which befell him at the age of 50 and has made him one of the most widely read authors in France, gave him a "second chance" that he did not hesitate to take advantage of to dedicate himself to his passion since he was a child, literature. .

Journey to the Pink City

Minier visits the Pink City with EL PAÍS, as Toulouse is known for its exposed brick buildings, on a hot afternoon in early June.

He does not need a map to show the streets that, book after book —and in France there are already seven installments, with an eighth in mind—, Servaz walks on the trail of murderers while listening to his beloved Gustav Mahler and thinking about his ghosts.

Especially in his dark side

doppelgänger

, the Swiss serial killer Julian Hirtmann, who likes to kill to the rhythm of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, also revered by Servaz.

Sisters

is a story in two times.

And in two seasons.

With only one case: that of the sisters Alice and Ambre Osterman, fans of a black novel writer, Erik Lang, brutally murdered in 1993. The then rookie Servaz is part of the team that investigates the case, which is considered closed too soon for your taste;

something doesn't add up.

A quarter of a century later, a more veteran Servaz —and more melancholy and allergic to new technologies— reopens the case when another death related to the same writer occurs.

The center of Toulouse, with its characteristic colors on the facades. Jean-Luc MANAUD (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Thanks to its time jumps,

Hermanas

delves into Servaz's past, from his father's suicide, which led him to drop out of literature studies when he was pointing out promising ways as a writer, to his failed marriage.

“I have the feeling of getting to know Servaz a little more and perhaps I have more things to say about him than when I published

Under the Ice

”, Justifies Minier.

“In the beginning, the character was necessary, he needed a policeman from Toulouse to investigate some crimes in the Pyrenees.

But he now he lives;

sometimes when I talk to my readers, they talk to me about Servaz as if he were a person who exists somewhere in the world, which is wonderful for an author.

Sometimes it even seems to me that he exists, that he is even more alive than some real people I know, ”he explains of a character he wanted to distance from all the clichés of the genre.

"A

thriller

is an exercise in extreme empathy, in the reader's identification with one or more characters, and that clearly goes through emotions."

At the same time, the story of a writer and some fans who are too obsessed with his work opens a door for Minier to tinker with the author-reader relationship.

"It's a Russian doll novel, with fiction within fiction," the writer smiles mischievously, knowing well what it means to have a fan who is a little too admiring.

The translation of

Sisters

coincides with the promotion in France of Minier's latest book,

Lucía

, which will hit Spanish bookstores in 2023. For this new saga, the French writer crosses the Pyrenees to set the plot in Spain, the country of origin of his mother and that he also knows very well, after years of travels throughout his territory.

It also comes with a new protagonist: Lucía Guerrero, lieutenant of the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard, the same one in which Sergeant Bevilacqua and his partner Chamorro work in the couple created by Lorenzo Silva.

"From time to time I write novels without Servaz, because we are like an old couple and, from time to time, each one needs to do things on their own", Minier justifies the change of protagonist.

He assures that it is only temporary: the policeman will return in his next novel, in which he is already working.

What does not change is the genre: the crime novel, which Minier considers an ideal platform to portray a world in transition.

"We novelists question society and I believe that crime novels today are the most capable of questioning it, the one that best accepts the challenge of contemporaneity and poses questions in a new world, in a new paradigm."

Even if his Servaz doesn't always understand the 21st century.

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Source: elparis

All life articles on 2022-06-09

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