Black novels that break clichés, recommended by Lorenzo Silva and Noemí Trujillo

Manuela Mauri, the inspector created by Lorenzo Silva and Naomi Trujillo, reaches his third novel in worse condition than ever. In The unmentionable Her health puts her on guard, while at the same time she faces a case of underage prostitution. An immersion, as is usual in the series written by the couple, into the dark corners of today’s society. We talked to them about the role of genre to x-ray the failures of our system and they leave us recommendations for crime novels that break clichés.

Video: interview with Lorenzo Silva and Noemí Trujillo

“For us, in Manuela Mauri’s series it is important to get closer to reality,” explains Lorenzo Silva. “That forces us to look at those cracks, at those fissures in society that, unfortunately, in some cases are persistent and that remain even if the typology may change.” Yes in If this is a womanthe first novel starring Mauri, that look led them to prostitution, in The Unnamable they return to it, but “from a completely different angle, that of the sexual exploitation of minors.”

“In the first book of the series, we already raised the question that we raise here: why as a society are we so tolerant of the issue of prostitution?” says Noemí Trujillo. “It seems that it is still a taboo, an uncomfortable topic, a topic that we do not want to address. It is a question that we return to. It is a problem that we have in our society and, yet, it is very difficult for us to talk about it and politicians seem to be worried about other issues. To give us an idea, Spain is a country in which there are 800 brothels and 770 hospital centers.”

Black novel to expose society

Those of Silva and Trujillo adhere, therefore, to that type of crime novel that puts a mirror in those areas of society that we avoid looking at. “Ramón Sender, the 20th century Spanish novelist, said that one of the functions of the novelist was to point out evil,” says Silva. “Literary fiction often points out evil. He can do it in a way that, at the same time, is perhaps more entertaining than other types of stories. You can also invite the reader to reflect from a freer place. I think that the interesting thing about writing a story in which you point out evils, which are also real evils, is that it is a very effective way of putting the reader at the center of the problem, as an almost lived experience, even if it is an experience mediated by a literary fiction.”

Trujillo, for his part, alludes to the power of dissemination of the genre. “I am a poet. I would love for poetry to have more readers, but the truth is that it doesn’t,” he laments. “I recently reread children of wrath, by Damaso Alonso, a cry of protest at a time when you cannot protest. Right now other poetry is being written, it is more personal poetry, more focused on identity issues, and poetry has somewhat abandoned social issues. So, although I am a poet and although I have worked on this combative line in some of my poems, the truth is that it does not have a framework that allows it to be disseminated. The crime novel does have readers. Furthermore, I believe that something important has been done for a long time since the crime novel, which is that, given the inefficiency of politicians who cannot agree on such important issues as prostitution and trafficking and exploitation of minors, , there are authors who have been making a point for a long time. They say, this is happening here and we have to look at this dark area.”

Flesh and blood detectives

Another characteristic of Silva and Trujillo’s novels is that they show characters who move away from the clichés of the noir genre. “When I read detective series I don’t like the investigator to be a fixed type. Throughout the deliveries the criminal cases change, but the investigator is always the same,” explains Trujillo. “I like that the character evolves, that he faces conflicts that could affect us in our daily lives, in our daily lives, because things happen to all of us. An axis that we have worked on, for example, is that of the body, that of illness. In the first book, Manuela starts on sick leave, she has witnessed the suicide of a coworker, it has been a very traumatic event and that leads her to be on sick leave for a few months and question many things about her work. In this third book, she has a serious health problem, one of those health problems that turns your life upside down. She looks like she is Mrs. Pupas. I promise that in the fourth book, if there is one, nothing will happen to her, she will not have any health problems, we will go another way.”

“Perhaps it is not so common for the researcher to face personal problems, relationship problems, maternity or paternity problems, health problems… But in the lives of all human beings these problems converge, they do not come in order,” adds Silva. “Manuela is a character who, especially in these first three novels, has to support herself coming from a series of unfavorable experiences and has to move forward, try to prevail in investigations that are not easy while facing other difficulties of different kind. And that seems to us to be a good way to show her character, to build it, to forge it and also to reveal her character.”

Books recommended by Lorenzo Silva

good times

Victoria González Torralba

Siruela

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I find the work that certain authors, and especially certain female authors, are doing within the genre or the surrounding areas of the noir genre, but trying to introduce a dose of ambition and reinvention from literature to the genre itself. It seems to me that a good example of this is, for example, the novel Good Times, by Victoria González Torralba, with a researcher who is an orphan girl taken in by her uncles, who is accidentally involved in a plot that she has to clarify in Spain. of late Francoism. It is a novel that, in the mold of the genre, poses an inquiry that goes further into our recent past, into another series of questions.

Starting from ETA terrorism and State terrorism, it traces the day after the criminal, in how the criminal manages his memory of himself, his memory of his crimes. And he seems very intelligent to me. He does it from a terrorist and from people who have been involved in State terrorism, taking on the crimes of ETA and the GAL. But this reflection also applies to the place that the crime occupies in the criminal’s memory as time passes. The negotiation that the criminal makes with his own memory in order to live in the most comfortable way possible. Many times resorting to amnesia and the mystification of his own biography. I think he is very well told in that novel.

Until the last breath

Manuel Calderon and Manuel Calderon

Tusquets Editores SA

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It is an essay, in this case, it is not fiction, but it reconstructs the life of Salvador Puig Antich, the anarchist militant who was executed by garrote in the last years of Franco’s rule, and of the police officer who died in a confrontation with Salvador Puig Antich. Everyone knows Salvador Puig Antich but no one knows the police officer who died exactly the same, that he was also a young man and that he was also a man with concerns and was not a one-dimensional police officer. Nobody is one-dimensional. It seems to me that this work of restitution both of what that anarchist movement was, that anarchist guerrilla in Barcelona and of that person swallowed by the black hole of history because he was a police officer and therefore it seems that he does not deserve pity or memory, I It seems to be exemplary.

Books recommended by Noemí Trujillo

Our dead

Rosa Ribas

Tusquets Editores SA

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The three books are fantastic, I really like the idea that Rosa had because not only does it introduce family themes into the crime novel but they all work together. The whole family works together to solve the case, and that raises new issues and something very fun is that always family secrets, typical family secrets are always present in the investigation.

The fugitive woman

Alicia Gimenez Bartlett

Destiny Editions

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I have been a great admirer of Petra Delicado, who is the most read female detective in 20th century Spanish literature, and it has been very happy news for me to know that, after a time without deliveries, we now had a new book. Lola Obiols, who is Rosa Ribas’ character, and Petra Delicado are the detective mother and detective stepmother that I like the most in contemporary crime novels.