Black novel in Spanish: everything you need to know about a genre in continuous expansion

In 1980, the cultural theorist Javier Coma published an essay in El viejo topo titled

.

The artifact served the reader to understand what was coming from abroad and what was beginning to flourish in the rickety Spanish landscape.

Today, the most powerful and diverse genre does not need contextualization.

Or if?

After demonstrating during the pandemic that it was the perfect refuge for the reader and one of the great assets of publishers to reach it, the crime novel is experiencing a prolific and expansive moment in Spain.

Nordic fashion is long gone, the fears of a bubble have been conjured, it is a solid part of the publishing business, dozens of novelties arrive at bookstores every quarter, festivals dot the Spanish geography and, without going any further, since last Thursday and until Sunday the 13th BCNegra, one of the most powerful on the European scene, is held in Barcelona.

But is this effervescence transferred to authors in Spanish?

Who stand out?

Why are we late again, but not bad?

The answers to these and other questions can trace the profiles of an unapproachable and transversal genre, which invades and allows itself to be invaded, comfortable in literary mestizaje.

Two clarifications before analyzing the crime scene.

Do not seek, in what follows, an exhaustive list of authors.

Nor is there room for any terminological battle: crime novel will be accepted as an expression that encompasses everything else: police,

, spy novel, hybrid, etc.

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Juan Madrid, conspire in Reims in 1981. “We had to apologize for what we did.

Now, that has changed”, assures Madrid.

Okay, but how did it all start?

Tradition assures that totalitarianism does not give good black novels.

There they are, for example, the Cuban Leonardo Padura or the Chinese Qiu Xiaolong to deny it.

In 1965, Francisco García Pavón created the first Spanish policeman to star in a series, "the only policeman we liked during the Franco regime", as the bookseller and cultural agitator Paco Camarasa would say.

His name is Manuel González, but he is known as Plinio and he is accompanied by his particular Watson, the veterinarian Don Lotario.

He is a local police officer in Tomelloso, Ciudad Real.

He appears for the first time in a short novel entitled

and reaches its fullness in

and

, with which Nadal wins.

They are good novels and good police stories that intelligently delve into the shadows of Francoism.

in 1974

, the first story of the mythical Pepe Carvalho (if we forget the experimental

), a true founding character of the Spanish noir novel, the protagonist of 23 books between novels and stories, a Mediterranean Philip Marlowe without whom what happened later in Spain or in part of Europe cannot be understood.

There you have Montalbano, the indispensable axis of the Mediterranean noir novel and Camilleri's brilliant tribute to the Barcelona master.

, by the way, was massacred by critics and did not sell anything.

Together with Vázquez Montalbán, Juan Madrid and Andreu Martín make the leap to the genre with novels with a markedly social, urban, transgressive and uncomfortable character, a style in which they have remained until today.

They are accompanied by Jorge M. Reverte and his journalist Julio Gálvez.

Francisco González Ledesma, formerly Silver Kane and other pseudonyms, constitutes the ideal bridge between newsstand literature —which kept the genre alive with his stories or those of Guillermo López Hipkiss— and its germinal period at the end of the seventies and during the decade of the the eighties.

Alicia Giménez Bartlett began in the crime novel "as a game".

She couldn't imagine where the character of Petra Delicado was going to take her.

In the image, the author in October 2020 in Barcelona. JUAN BARBOSA

Wait a minute, are there only gentlemen here?

In the Spanish noir novel, and in the universal novel and may Miss Marple forgive us, an author with a female lead was slow to arrive, but when she did, it was with overwhelming force.

There is some precedent (the detective Lònia Guiu novels written by Maria Antònia Oliver) but it is in 1996 when Alicia Giménez Bartlett creates Petra Delicado, an agent of the National Police in Barcelona, ​​divorced several times, that we meet for the first time. time, already with Fermín Garzón as squire, in

.

Since then, 11 novels and a book of stories, a huge success in Italy or Germany and, above all, an open path for other authors to follow.

Reading barometers prove every year that women read more than men, much more.

And they are also reducing the distance in published books (around 60%-40% according to 2020 data).

How is all this reflected in the genre?

“I think that much more crime novels written by women are being read and that is the first step.

It sounds like something from prehistory, but many male readers felt for so long that a book written by a woman was not for them.

To get to festivals, awards or literary criticism in the cultural media, we needed to be read.

That is changing little by little, with great effort on our part, and having to put up with complaints for our complaints”, reflects Argentinean Claudia Piñeiro, author of

or

and Pepe Carvalho award from BCNegra 2018, one of the writers who has best known how to walk that path.

She is not the only one and it has not been easy.

Berna González Harbor and the curator of Ella Ruiz de Ella won the Dashiell Hammett in 2020, an award granted by the Black Week of Gijón and that had only been awarded once in 32 years to a woman (Cristina Fallarás in 2012).

In 2021 it was won by Piñeiro herself.

Rosa Ribas since the 2000s or Arantza Portabales for a few years have followed the solid police tradition.

Those looking for a more rogue path have Esther García Llovet, always from the margins, and those who want a literary commitment to test the limits of the genre and move it away from the ludic will find it in the Zarco series by Marta Sanz, crowned with excellence by

.

This story would be lame without the phenomenon generated by Dolores Redondo with the Baztán Trilogy.

Started in 2013 with

, the series starring Amaia Salazar sold hundreds of thousands of copies, was multi-translated, was made into a movie at full speed and put the small Navarran town of Elizondo on the global map.

If some frequented the path opened by Giménez Bartlett, in their own way Eva García Sáenz de Urturi or María Oruña have known how to exploit the highway opened by Redondo.

More information

News, advances, lists of recommendations and more in Elemental, the black novel blog of EL PAÍS

If it had been written before October 15, 2021, this report would talk about the success of Carmen Mola and the novels starring inspector Elena Blanco, but the Planeta Prize gutted the plot and the mystery was reduced to a trio of screenwriters, all men .

And of the new batch?

Let Giménez Bartlett herself choose: "Personally, I read Susana Martín Gijón with great pleasure."

Is it the most read genre?

It is a genre with a solid social presence —not in the media, despite what they are now dealing with— and it has more festivals, reading clubs and more followers or, at least, better organized ones than any other.

It is also a popular genre, something that has often played against its members and how they were perceived in the literary world.

But is it the most read?

That will always depend on who you ask.

The data handled by the publishers provided by the GFK consulting firm is not public.

Now, we know that Juan Gómez-Jurado has sold more than two million copies of

(understood as a trilogy together with

and

).

Between the three of them, they have passed 160 editions and 155 weeks on the best-seller lists.

These and other figures related to Gómez-Jurado are unknown to the rest of the genre and the Spanish literary scene.

There are other cases.

Javier Castillo went from self-publishing to over a million copies with his five novels published by the Penguin Random House group to date.

To this is added the already mentioned commercial success of Dolores Redondo or one of the longest wind, that of the contemporary classic Lorenzo Silva, already more than 20 years telling the stories of his couple of civil guards, Bevilacqua and Chamorro.

Hyperactive writer, podcaster, best-selling author, signature record, Amazon rating record.

Everyone is superlative with Juan Gómez Jurado. In the image he poses in Madrid at the end of 2020. Olmo Calvo

Not all, of course, follow this fate and the Spanish crime novel, like Spanish literature in general, is full of notable authors of minimal print runs who seek sustenance elsewhere and suffer, why deny it, from overproduction.

There are many readers, yes, more than any other genre, perhaps, but not so many for so many novels.

Is my city the only one in Spain without a black festival?

he usually underlines the fact that it is not questioned that there are many football stadiums or other activities but there are black novel festivals.

The truth is that readers mobilize.

“The objective of the Black Week is the promotion of reading.

The more encounters there are with this target, the better.

Just like book fairs, the more the better”, summarizes De la Calle.

The first poster of the already legendary Black Week and the tenth anniversary of BCNegra.

Two encounters united by black criminal passion.

And you're really not going to give us a list of usual suspects?

Sometimes it might seem that there is a genre for every author.

This makes it difficult to draw up any prescribing list, but here are some reading clues, in addition to what has already been mentioned.

If we talk about urban noir novels, Carlos Zanón —who enters and leaves the genre like many other colleagues— emerges immediately.

In addition, he was in charge of following in the footsteps of Carvalho, as the commissioner of BCNegra and in the novel that continued with the character's adventures.

Víctor del Arbol was a

who now writes crime novels revered in France in which the police do not play a relevant role and Toni Hill, a translator, took his place on the black criminal map with the books by

Héctor Salgado.

If you want

, of bad-living gulfs in all strata of the social scale, the teacher is Alexis Ravelo and if they wish, instead, that the

be the author, go through the books of impossible arguments by the poet Carlos Salem.

The psychological bet, the cloudy, is dominated by Marcelo Luján's measured prose like nobody else.

The two authors are Argentines living in Spain for so long that it is difficult to know where to place them.

They are not the only ones.

Lorenzo Silva collects the best of the great series of the genre.

Pure police starring two civil guards: Bevilacqua and Chamorro.

In the image, during the signings of the Madrid Book Fair in 2021.MIGUEL PEREIRA (Getty Images)

Away from the big cities, Eugenio Fuentes from Cáceres has created an essential character with Ricardo Cupido and throughout seven novels.

And, speaking of characters, two who fly under the radar, but with force: the prolific Jordi Sierra i Fabra, who also has his place in the noir genre with the series by Inspector Mascarell, and Commissioner Polo, by Justo Navarro, who It successfully mixes crime and historical novels, a hybrid that, by the way, is about to develop in Spain (despite good incursions such as those of Ignacio del Valle), with the intensity that it reaches in other places in Europe.

Something similar happens with the espionage genre.

We could go on for a few more pages, but we already said that this was by no means a shopping list.

Now, what about the other almost 500 million Spanish speakers?

Such a fruitful tradition and such a vital reality would require much more space, but let's leave a few brushstrokes.

We bring to start, Borges and Bioy Casares.

How?

They will wonder.

Well, it is their quality as editors, readers and translators that, since 1945, allowed the great British and American classics to be read in Spanish in the good editions of El Séptimo Círculo.

The publishing house published its last book, 366, in 1983. Not bad as a popularization exercise.

Ricardo Piglia also loved the genre, spread it and frequented it with his brilliant curator Croce.

Gender in Spanish is a round trip between two continents.

Carlos Zanón, Spanish, and Claudia Piñeiro, Argentine, exemplify this symbiosis.

In the image, the two in Barcelona in 2018. Quique García (EFE)

Osvaldo Soriano debuted with

, a curious tribute to Marlowe, in 1973, but it would be later with

or

when it consolidates the foundations of a tradition, followed later by Guillermo Saccomanno and others, so American, of novels that decompose the evils of societies and spit them out in the form of novel plots. The also Argentinian María Inés Krimer looks at the same reality but from the feminine side, a vein that has not stopped growing and that has in the aforementioned Piñeiro or in Fernanda Melchor superb writers who are testing the limits of the genre and opening the reader's eyes. . The Latin American noir novel is thriving and has a global perspective, and the Princess of Asturias Award for Leonardo Padura, the success of the Mexican narco novel Élmer Mendoza and his Zurdo Mendieta or the fictions of the Peruvian Santiago Roncagliolo are three proofs of its vitality and scope .We do not forget the Chilean Luis Sepúlveda and his excellent stories full of nostalgia and style that showed the stigmas of the dictatorship like few others.

Is the crime novel a dangerous ghetto?

literature

as opposed to

, among other things because the border that separates them is far from being impermeable: there are transfers in both directions... although they do not have the same meaning."

The author of the accurate analysis is Pierre Lemaitre in his

recently published in Spain

He knows what he is talking about: a proud member of the ghetto, he saw how he had to abandon crime fiction to be recognized and win the Goncourt.

In Spain there has always been exchange in two directions.

From Eduardo Mendoza and

to Javier Cercas with the novels of Melchor Marín passing through Arturo Pérez-Reverte and his Falcó series, there have been no shortage of visitors to one or another modality of the criminal universe.

And backwards?

Well, too, and a lot, sometimes because that's how the literary path marks it, others because of the voracity of certain prizes that wanted a writer and his readers, not so much that he was still in the ghetto.

The awards are a delicate issue, but it is true that two of the commercial awards with the most money and resonance (the Nadal and the Planet) have on their payroll not a few black novel authors awarded for a work ascribed to the genre.

, by Carmen Mola, the last Planeta Prize winner with a controversial gift, is the perfect paradigm of all the factors involved.

Do you have to be critical of the system?

What if I just want to have fun?

Discarded the terminological explanation (which attributes qualities and conditions to crime novels other than crime novels,

or spy novels) let's talk about traditions. Social criticism is an element to take into account, but not essential if we understand crime novels as a broad field of literary creation. It is present in the

of the thirties and forties of the twentieth century, in Chandler, Hammett or Horace McCoy, a stage that goes beyond the enigma novel, allergic to social concerns. It also constitutes the essence of the

genre that changed the genre in France in the seventies at the hands of Jean-Patrick Manchette and the plan of 10 novels by the founders of

Nordic, Maj Sjöwal and Per Wahlöo, movements both of wide influence in Europe that reached Spain with force.

“You have to be closer to reality and have conflicts.

If there is no conflict, what are you telling me?” asks Juan Madrid.

Dolores Redondo incorporated the tradition and magic of the mountains of Navarra for her Baztán trilogy, which began in 2013 with 'El guardián invisible'.

In the image, at the presentation of the prequel 'La cara norte del corazón'.

And yet, the genre in Spain has grown so much and in so many ways that this social criticism has ceased to be a defining feature as it could have been in the eighties. It exists, who can deny it, and there we have the novels by Ravelo, Piñeiro and Sanz, or the approximations of David Llorente as examples, but it has been diluted. And that without mentioning the more playful side, the

, the show novel, the hybridization with the sentimental chronicle, all already addressed above and which are, ultimately, those that draw a mass of readers in Spain. And one last aspect: genre so prone to not knowing where it begins and where it ends, many times it is in those border areas where the sharpest criticisms are. Lean, if not, and here we look again at the other side of the ocean,

, by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara or

, by Dolores Reyes.

But, hadn't I already read this novel?

“I laugh when someone tells me about the

: 'Yes, very good, great.

Well, do it yourself”, commented Gómez-Jurado in an interview with EL PAÍS in 2021. And therein lies the problem: in a genre saturated with novels, the mold is repeated in search of the same readers.

“The black genre in Spain is in full swing although, seeking success, it has tended towards uniformity: blood, viscera, violence, magic touches, regionalization of detectives... I don't know, I guess it's a European trend and not just of our country”, summarizes Giménez Bartlett.

The positive effect of this overproduction is the possibility of finding authors and books that are out of this routine.

In these lines you will find many and those to come.

Speaking of success: it's not every day that a Spanish writer lands on the scene after receiving the approval of critics and readers in the United States and the United Kingdom with a novel written in English.

Her name is Virginia Feito and she has published

, a

high-flying psychological

How could it be otherwise, the comparison of her with Patricia Highsmith is exaggerated, but the success obtained is not.

Coda: two damned to return to

They did not come to the black novel to make friends. His characters are not in the politically correct box. His stories, in the first person, leave the bitter aftertaste of good sad stories. Julián Ibáñez explores in Bellón's novels a world plagued by "fulanos", neighborhood people, smart-alecky policemen, violent types, office workers who "seem to wait for sandwich time to commit suicide". Carlos Pérez Merinero arrived without a fixed character, if we exclude amorality, but with an idea: to write novels and stories with personality, fast, simple in appearance and lasting memories. Pérez Merinero died in 2012. Ibáñez is still active. Find your books if you want a little truth.

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