Éric Fouassier, the chemist who found the perfect formula for the historical crime novel

Éric Fouassier (Tours, 60 years old) contracted the literature virus at a very early age.

A fanatical reader of Dumas, Verne and

The Mysteries of Paris

by Eugène Sue, he soon tried his luck as a writer: before he came of age he had already sent his first manuscript to three of the major publishing houses in France.

Gallimard's encouraging response was the first step in a career that has led him, thanks to books that mix historical novels and thrillers, to success in terms of critics and audiences.

But along the way there were bumps, twists and turns.

“I studied high school science, then Pharmacy, with a thesis on pharmaceutical chemistry in literature, and then Law,” he said last week at the BCNegra festival.

Then came the gymnastics, the strengthening of prose through the short novel.

In that field he coincided, among others, with Bernard Minier, whom he met in the hall of the Barcelona hotel where he tends to this newspaper.

“They were ideal because I didn't have much time for anything else.

I wrote about 50 between 2000 and 2005. I entered many contests,” he summarizes.

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Several years, 13 novels of all kinds and countless stories later, success came with the first novel in his series

The Cabinet of Hidden Mysteries

, titled in the same way and published in Spain by Principal Noir.

“I don't know why but before publishing it I knew something was happening.

It was quickly translated into Japanese and everyone was talking about it.

“It was the first time that teenagers treated my work as if it were a Netflix series.”

Then came 40,000 audiobook downloads in one year and more than half a million copies with the three installments (

The Vicar's Ghost

, also in Principal, and

Les nuits de la peur bleue

, still to be translated).

Where is the key?

“I think that the problems of that time resonate with today's reader in historical plots with themes more typical of

thrillers

.

There are also a series of strong characters that readers follow,” he says through his round glasses and an almost constant smile, the face of the kind professor that he still is when he is not writing.

The protagonist of these novels is Valentin Verne, a Parisian dandy with an almost perfect face tinged, however, with a “moving melancholy.”

Single, solitary and not very talkative, he has a certain tendency towards introspection, most likely generated by the horrors experienced from an early age.

“He is a less cold Sherlock Holmes, a carnal Holmes,” summarizes the author when asked about the resemblance to Arthur Conan Doyle's mythical detective, with whom he even shares his mastery in bartitsu, a mixed martial art typical of gentlemen. Victorians.

Fouassier was delighted to be back in Spain, a country that made a vivid impression when he was a budding young writer.Albert Garcia

Verne directs the Brigade of Occult Mysteries, created in 1830 to unravel impossible crimes in an era in which encyclopedic enlightenment and empiricism do not completely prevail over shadows and superstitions.

This fight is perfectly reflected throughout the series, accompanied by wonderful locations and a great sense of police rhythm.

The mysteries of these novels are set in a Paris in full transformation thanks to a rising and powerful bourgeois class, with new neighborhoods very different from those of the medieval Île de la Cité.

“It is the most romantic time,” he defends, “I wanted with all my might for Paris to be a character.

A Paris of contrasts, which reaches the reader through the senses.”

A city in which only one class remains unchanged, always with luck against it: the working class, the miserable.

But what defines every hero is his nemesis and here Valentin Verne has one on par with Moriarty, even more terrible: the Vicar, “a condensed form of cruelty”, a man that Fouassier skillfully uses to bring out the dark side. of its protagonist in an all-out fight.

“He is my pretty boy,” he assures with a somewhat sly laugh, accustomed to the reaction of his interlocutor when he describes this horrible being as such.

“He is made to be detested.

A very characteristic bad guy of the time.”

Vidocq and historical truth

The author plays very well with the changes that are taking place within criminal investigation, and even uses Eugène-François Vidocq as a guest star.

The man who was the first director of the modern French police led a life like a novel: a prestigious criminal, he entered the police force as a snitch and ended up directing it, modernizing it and giving it a structure similar to the current one before becoming a writer, setting up a printing press, publish his memoirs and a handful of successful novels endorsed by friends like Balzac.

“The only limit I set for myself when treating him as a fictional character was to give him historical coherence, never making him do impossible things or in places where he was not,” he explains.

Hooked on the authenticity of the authors he admires, Fouassier achieves the balance between imagination and documentation (one of the great challenges of all authors of this genre) and resorts to other elements of identification, such as killing off characters whom he admires. that readers have taken a liking to.

“Killing them is always complicated, but the popular novel of the 19th century was a bit Manichean and here I wanted to distance it from caricature.

Readers find him terrible, but he gives it authenticity.”

An admirer of Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Fouassier confesses that he makes plans within each book, but then he does not respect them.

What he does strictly maintain is the pact of trust with readers that he learned with short novels.

And the love of entertainment.

Before the fourth installment, in which he will travel to Algeria invaded and conquered by the French, the series will be a comic and the audiovisual adaptation is underway.

Along the way, Fouassier will continue to be hooked on literature in all its forms.

In the libraries and cinemas of Barcelona where BCNegra is celebrated, some young people will have been inoculated with the virus to follow in its footsteps.

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