Police novels?

I confess that I was very concerned when I heard that Javier Cercas was going to write a police novel.

Who ordered one of the best writers of our language, after having written those masterpieces that are, among his other books,

to write one of those little novels that have more than riddle and calculation that of literature?

But after having read the three volumes of his last novel, and, above all, the last one,

I have nothing to object to: the "author" of the crime appears there just as in William Faulkner's novels, as a simple pretext, although the action takes place independently of the police riddle, or, rather, it is there, showing off from the beginning of the story, without veils or detours for whoever wants to see it.

And it is, of course, an extraordinary novelty that in a "police novel" it is the policemen themselves who commit a crime to bring order to a reality that is deeply corrupted, and that has no way to return to legality except by altering it and violating her

The last 100 or 150 pages of

they are truly extraordinary.

Since it is known that Carrasco has a detailed plan to defeat the millionaire who has set up a brothel of young ladies that he and his friends have corrupted and destroyed, readers forget about Cosette and are only interested in the plan, devised by Carrasco, to sink the powerful and corrupt businessman.

And the story is so well run that you should not lose a moment in the conspiracy until it ends.

And the story rises once again, at this point in the novel, when Cosette leaves her sickbed, and informs her father and her police friends that she has decided to testify before the judge about the violence inflicted on her, and that, later, he has decided to be a gendarme, an honest and far-reaching one,

as his father was —who started out as a policeman and ended up as a librarian— and as they all are: exemplary citizens.

It is a novel —a fictional series— that has something of a balm, that comforts us from the miseries that we see around us at every moment.

I was thinking about the great writers, after reading this "police" novel by Javier Cercas, and I discovered that almost all of them, starting with Charles Dickens and continuing with Ernest Hemingway and almost all of the modern ones that matter most to me, take advantage of the genre police, although no one would dare to place them among the typical authors of this genre, which, without a doubt, has never ceased to have its readers and followers.

But, and in this I follow one of the great critics of our time, I am referring to the North American Edmund Wilson, no one would imagine a William Faulkner among the followers of the "police" genre, although in almost all his novels the great southern writer takes advantage, and in what way, the most typical of police stories.

What does this genre consist of?

In that there is a murder and in discovering —before the author does— the manager of the crime.

The levels of sophistication that the authors of this genre have reached are very high, of course, and it is not strange that they resort to the most destructive, elaborate and recent inventions, in their inventions, or that they have determined, anything can happen, that the crime industry has taken advantage of police novels to refine itself and imitate those complicated ways of producing the death of enemies.

It could happen in Mexico, where in reality, more than in books, the art of killing has reached indescribable extremes.

However, there is a moment, which is not easy to pinpoint, when the crime novel ceases to be literature and becomes something else: a mere riddle.

When does this occur?

When identifying the killer(s) is more important than anything else, that is, how well or poorly written the novel is, the uniqueness or perfect or imperfect humanity of the detectives or discoverers, the city or country where it takes place , and, mainly, the language in which the novel is written, on which, of course, everything in literature depends.

Literary readers know perfectly well when crime novels cease to be "good literature" and the text of the story becomes something else: a riddle at best, or, in the most sophisticated of them, a story apart, in which the crime, or crimes, cease to be important and become a mere pretext to create the police intrigue.

This intrigue is what, ultimately, marks the difference between a police novel and a literary work.

It goes without saying that there is no equivalence between one and the other, because literature can change people's lives, and a police novel is only capable of entertaining readers for a while, or even perverting them, to the extent that those novels obstruct the assimilation of true literature.

Is there a rigidly established border between true and false literature?

Yes, there is, but it is not the same for everyone, and just as a common minimum can be established for readers of good and authentic literature, it would be possible, without a doubt, to determine with a certain degree of precision among genuine readers of crime novels and those who, like the one who writes this, have never felt overwhelmed with those stories, although these, in fact, are capable of exalting curiosity or the need to "want to know" more than what is known, until detecting the name or the society of true killers.

Of course there are differences between the two books.

So much so that I would dare to establish a point of disagreement, and affirm that, just as writers can take advantage of the typical ingredients of crime novels to refer to their stories, these, as Javier Cercas does in his latest novel, can perfectly use ingredients or partial forms of police stories, provided that in their writings there are, in addition, other things.

That is perhaps the biggest difference: the writers of crime novels cannot alter the essential dilemma of the genre, the discovery of the murderer or murderers, without their stories ceasing to be part of that genre —the crime novel— and becoming part of that genre. part, for better or for worse -generally the latter is the most frequent of cases- of plain literature.

What unites or distances these genres?

A real world.

In a "police" novel, the fundamental thing is to discover the murderer and this depends on the ability that current practice has developed in the reader, and the lucubrations and complexities that the authors use to stimulate the curiosity of their readers, while that in literature it will never be the most important thing to identify a murderer, but to change the lives of the people who read, revealing to them the greater complexity of the real world that they thought they imagined, or awakening certain appetites or longings in the readers, who, from from that novel, they discover a new world, or a new way to start in this world, aware of its complexities or secret structures, on which they feel that their lives will depend in the future.

Reading Fyodor Dostoevsky or Gustave Flaubert is not reading Arthur Conan Doyle, although all three are eminent masters in the genre they cultivate.

But it is the genre that establishes the distances, not the authors, who may be the greatest in that specialty.

© Mario Vargas Llosa, 2022. World press rights in all languages ​​reserved to Ediciones EL PAÍS, SL, 2022.

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