Martín Llade is on the phone as on television or the radio: a torrent. And it is clear that the voice of the New Year’s concert from Vienna is happy, since his latest novel, ‘The Razumovsky Mystery’, has already reached its second edition. In the 650 pages of it, “with not very large handwriting” – he warns with a smile -, the writer dresses up a recognizable Ludwig van Beethoven as a sagacious detective: deaf, choleric, passionate and radical, as well as a musical composer. Accompanied by his personal doctor Watson (Anton Schindler), the German genius will delve into the darkest depths to solve a murder while creating a symphony: the Ninth.
Professor Antonio Illán will try to prevent Martín Llade from leaving for the mountains of Toledo when this Wednesday, starting at 8:00 p.m., the two chat in the bookstore The Paper Burrow, in the Valparaíso urbanization. Illán, who defines himself as “a lover of literature and a mechanic of words”, will face a Formula 1 of communication.
Llade, who met a murderer when he was doing theater in Bilbao, will explain to the public and to the bookseller Natalia Magariños that turning Beethoven into a detective was born as a joke. Looking for a publisher for his previous novel, ‘What I’ll Never Know About Teresa’, a very prestigious one asked him if he had anything to do with detectives. “It’s the only thing that interests us,” they assured him..
Displeased, the journalist told his wife that in the end he would have to turn Ludwig into a Sherlock Holmes-style investigator. “It was a joke that I kept up for a year until one day I decided.”
Runs 1814. A congress is held in Vienna while a plot is hatched around Count Andrei Razumovsky, Russian ambassador to the Austrian city and protector of Beethoven, who would later write three very famous quartets for him. Ludwig then gets to work as a detective following the murder of an old maid at the Razumovsk mansion during a party, which gives rise to a conspiracy with more crimes surrounding him.
But why Razumovsky and not another patron of the German composer. «While investigating, I discovered that a real and tragic event happened to him, which I will not reveal; I knew then that I had the end of the novel”, published by Ediciones B. However, Llade puts a note in the margin for the seasoned: “Even if people go to Wikipedia and find that fact, it will not clarify anything about the criminal plot.”
In the novel “there are many false clues,” warns its author, who presents a Beethoven “deaf, very deaf, but who reads lips very well, which will help him resolve part of the plot.” A tangle that is told by Anton Felix Schindler, who years later was the secretary of the composer who changed music. «Schinler was a liar and he invented many things about Beethoven. In fact, when Schindler tells something about Beehthoven, if he is not verified by other witnesses, he is not given credit. So, He seemed like the perfect narrator for this story.. “That would be one more Schindler lie,” says Martín Llade.
The Ninth Symphony, whose premiere turned two centuries old on May 7, is also part of one of the plots of the novel, in which “there are as many truths as there are lies. The most surprising things are real,” its author warns again. «It’s like a dream: there are many real fragments, but they are intertwined through fiction. It’s like a biography of Beethoven compressed into four months of his life.“, summarizes.
Written over four years, “the summers especially,” she was stringing together phrases while listening to classical music and not reggaeton. “In the novel there is a list of eighty works that the reader will find in the book’s cover or, otherwise, chapter by chapter.” Although she warns sailors: «It is not only read by music lovers; also by people who like history or crime novels. And they’re liking it, hey! Because to read it you don’t necessarily have to listen to music or know about Beethoven.
Llade confesses that he has always been a great reader of black chronicles, “whether national or international.” He has the compilation of the weekly events El Caso – “I’m an absolute fan,” he says -; and Paco Pérez Abellán “I love everything he did.” He also quotes the ABC journalist Cruz Morcillo… “I love the black chronicle and I really like ‘true crime’, which is experiencing a golden age,” he adds with nuances: “Let’s see, I like it above all because of how they catch to the bad ones, not because of morbidity. And he says that coincided, in a play read at the Arriaga in Bilbao, with an actor who later killed his partner.
600 kilometers from there, the journalist and writer will coincide this summer with another detective through the birlibirloque of his creator, Professor Luis García Jambrina, who has turned Miguel de Unamuno into a sagacious crime investigator in ‘The First Case of Unamuno ‘. He will be at the crime novel festival ‘Gata negra’ in Moraleja (Cáceres).
The public will then be able to ask Martín Llade why, curiously, the last chapter of ‘The Razumovski Mystery’ takes place on January 1, 1815, exactly 124 years before the first edition of the concert that has given it so much popularity. «It has not been searched, but that is how it had to be. The New Year’s concert is what people associate me with, and it amuses me. “This association seems very nice to me,” he says, less than three months after turning 48.
