The black and romantic genres: from discredit to best-sellers

You only have to look at the best-seller lists of any magazine or supplement to realize that love and crime are often readers' favorite topics.

It is common to find the latest crime novel by Carmen Mola, Eva García Sáenz de Urturi, Juan Gómez-Jurado or Susana Martín Gijón, or the most recent love story by Alice Kellen, Blue Jeans or Andrea Longarela, in the top positions.

It is paradoxical, because they have been genres usually mistreated by critics and academia: Jorge Luis Borges pointed out that critics and academics did not like the police because it was not boring enough.

The journalist and writer Marta Robles has decided to investigate these contradictions and unite both literary styles in the Rosa & Negro festival, which begins this Tuesday, February 13 in Tres Cantos and will last for six days full of activities with screenings, talks, forums and awards ceremonies.

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“Despite the sales figures, even today they continue to be little considered.

I do not believe that literature, because it is black or pink, is good or bad;

It is measured by its literary values, like any other color,” argues Robles.

Prejudice towards both genders is not the only link between them, perhaps the most obvious is that of the predefined patterns in which both operate.

“The crime novel seeks to surprise and the romantic novel seeks to excite;

In both genres you have to control the times well to maintain the rhythm.

You have some ingredients that the reader is familiar with beforehand and the challenge is to be able to mix them and make the result unique and work,” says romance writer Alice Kellen, the best-selling in Spain in 2022 and author of titles such as

(2023) and

(2022).

“The luck factor is decisive, being in the right place and at the right time,” responds modestly about her success, who is also “godmother” of the event and proposed Mónica Rouanet and Abril Camino, authors of romantic novels, for the festival.

For Juan Díaz Canales, screenwriter of

(the European black genre comic par excellence), the codes and stereotypes of the two styles are, at the same time, a blessing and a curse.

“On the one hand, it has a lot of ground gained;

It is good to handle the characteristic elements because it makes you have a grammar, a common language, the reader expects a series of things, that the characters behave in a certain way.

But at the same time, you can fall into repetition;

That's why it's interesting to look for a mix of genres.”

The cartoonist, who will be present on Saturday at a round table on

comics , points as examples of this hybridization to

, which mixes science fiction and noir genre, or even with superheroes such as the 90s animated series Batman, from Bruce Timm and Paul Dini.

The writer and organizer of the Rosa & Negro festival, Marta Robles.Tres Cantos City Council

Another proof of the flexibility of the genre is the graphic novel

(2021), about two investigators in the Franco era of the 1950s and where detective, suspense and historical styles come together.

Its author, Teresa Valero, is another of those invited to Saturday's debate, along with Díaz Canales, Carlos Portela and Antonio Altarriba.

“I am interested in the genre not so much because of the enigma to be solved, but because of the social substance and the construction of characters,” she says.

The quality of adapting to other types of story is also possessed by romance;

can be told through a dystopia, like the movie

(2015), or a gothic story like the literary classic Wuthering

(1847).

“It is an inexhaustible and very broad topic, which fits into almost any other situation and allows us to explore the ins and outs of the human being or travel to different eras,” says Kellen, who will moderate several meetings (the full program can be seen here).

To the literary stigma and the flexibility of swimming in other genres, another point in common could be added to pink and black: the very long tradition that both carry on their backs.

It is difficult to trace its origins precisely, but the former had an initial rise with 19th-century Romanticism, which saw authors such as Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters;

while the second may have found a genesis in the 1920s with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, a consolidation of its atmosphere with the arrival of the German Expressionists in Hollywood (Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak) and a diversification into countless subgenres. currently.

Beyond traditions and norms, the objective of labels is to guide the reader about the type of stories they will find and not to limit themselves to a style.

Kellen notes: “Genres are fine so that booksellers can place books in an orderly manner, let's put it that way, but I think that a reader, a good reader, has to go further.

Reading should open our minds and not the other way around.

You have to free yourself a little, right?

Calmly enter a bookstore, walk around without paying too much attention to the signs, read the first pages...