In a satire disguised as an essay, ‘On Murder Considered One of the Fine Arts’, Thomas de Quincey noted that “in the murdered person, every quarrel of thought, every ebb and flow of passion and intention, is subdued by a Irresistible panic, the instant fear of death crushes him with its petrified mallet But in the murderer, a murderer a poet would admit, there must be latent a great storm of passion, jealousy, ambition, revenge, hatred, that will create hell in it; and into this hell we will look”.
Almost 200 years after writing these texts, published as newspaper articles in 1827 and 1829, the French thriller writer Bernard Minier decided to use a very artistic and elusive assassin to “park” his “fetish character of Martin Servaz” and start a new literary saga on the other side of the Pyrenees. In ‘Lucía’ (Editorial Salamandra), Minier introduces us to a lieutenant from the Civil Guard’s Operational Center Unit (UCO) who is chasing a murderer who has been acting for 30 years and always in a very plastic way throughout Spain. . Thus, it is about a criminal who places the corpses in positions that recreate scenes from paintings by Renaissance painters inspired by Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’.
It all begins with the discovery of the lifeless body of a Civil Guard sergeant attached to a cross, for which the protagonist takes the investigation as a personal matter. In conversation with this newspaper, Minier points out that she is interested in “the extravagant”, going beyond a reality. “The novel is a lie, a lie that tells the truth and that is not born from pure imagination, but from a reality that transforms and transcends to make the novel,” explains the French author, who acknowledges that “it was a lot of fun” to create a murderer who is inspired by Renaissance and Baroque painting, like the Flemish primitives, of which he considers himself a “total fan”.
However, he qualifies that “fortunately in real life I don’t think murderers have that much imagination.” With a good mix between pacing, creating oppressive atmospheres and cultural data, the investigators pursue the criminal while deciphering messages left behind with each crime. To do this, they will have the help of a group of Criminology students from the University of Salamanca and their professor, Professor Salomón Borges, since they have created a computer project called ‘DIMAS’ that is “capable of combining data from all archives of the different bodies and security forces of the State existing in Spain, and to look for common characteristics in crimes that up to now no one has connected”.
Minier remarks that, upon discovering the existence, in real life, of this group, transformed in the work, he decided to set the novel in Salamanca, which he describes as “an open-air museum.” “From my first steps in Salamanca I understood that it was the perfect setting for a novel that goes back and forth between the most noble past and the most contemporary present” explains the author who has been in this city these days to present the book. Despite the fact that Toulouse and Salamanca are two university cities, Minier explains that his choice of setting for the novels has nothing to do with it. When passing ‘Under the ice’ in the Pyrenees, he needed a local police officer and that is why he chose Servaz, a commander in Toulouse, a city he knew from his student days.
“In the case of Salamanca, my idea was to place my novel in one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in Europe. It could have been Oxford or Cambridge, but many British crime novelists have already done it and very well. It could have been the Sorbonne, but I wanted a smaller city around it, a city that kept its old look. And so I set my sights on Salamanca.”
Another reason is that “I have a bit of Spanish blood in my veins,” explains the author, since his mother “was born in Alto Aragón” and left for France at the age of eight. Minier assures that from a young age he discovered that area in the province of Huesca and that at the age of 20 he toured Spain at the time of the ‘Movida’ that began in Madrid and spread throughout the country. “Being 20 years old and living that was an absolute privilege, a great opportunity. I never cut this link with Spain,” says the author, who points out that he still has contacts, friends and family in our country.
“When I wanted to rest a bit from my fetish character, Servaz, I thought of moving the novel to the other side of the Pyrenees, since I also grew up here,” explains Minier, who has already half a dozen installments in the saga of the French character and this year the last one is published. In this sense, his first novel ‘Under the ice’, published in 2011, was a revolution in crime fiction, not only because of the intrigue or the characters, but also because of the oppressive atmosphere in which the action takes place. Minier points out that in Spain there is a “diversity and different identities” that allows the creation of “extraordinary sets and scenarios”.
Thus, in the play the action takes place in Salamanca and Segovia, “two tremendous cities” according to the French writer, but also Alto Aragón, which “I have known for many years”. “I always need an atmosphere, a setting to start the novel, perhaps because of my way of writing it has something cinematographic,” explains the author, who points out that “the clouds help me write” despite being born in the south of France. “I’m like Thomas Mann who in ‘Mario and the Magician’ said he hated empty, blue skies. I feel a bit the same, it must be raining or snowing,” said Minier, who points out how Galicia would better adjust to that different atmosphere to set the scene a noir novel
Minier takes care of all the details and one of them is the differences between the police forces in Spain and France. He explains to this newspaper that the main one is that the Central Operative Unit of the Civil Guard can investigate throughout Spain while in France “my Servaz character is a police officer from Toulouse” and his area of ??competence is limited to the southwest of the country. “It is the difference with Lucía Guerrero, that she can go anywhere in Spain, from Madrid. That is a difference. Then there are many common points,” explains the author, who assures that to prepare the character he spoke with agents of the Civil Guard in Huesca about the type of crime that existed in the area, such as drug trafficking, robberies or sexist violence.
“They explained to me that in the last year they had arrested about 20 people, of which 17 were for violence against women. It is very similar to what happens in France. And they also told me that they have the same difficulties as the police and the gendarmerie in France, with the material, like old cars, or that there is more and more administrative part, more paperwork than field work”, says the author.
What would be a good police tool is the DIMAS project that Minier creates in his novel as a large database on crimes that would feed all the security forces and bodies, although sometimes there are too many bureaucratic obstacles of competition between them. The author points out that these situations can occur in other parts of the world and explains his experience setting a novel in Seattle and the surrounding islands, in the state of Washington, since the investigation of a crime depends on where the body appears due to the numerous policemen who have powers: “Here it is exactly the same. It seems that all over the world there is this bureaucratic labyrinth between the police. It is not something special to Spain or France.”
Minier’s novels always stand out for the strength of their main female characters. It could not be less with Lieutenant Lucía Guerrero who commands a police unit “in a world dominated by men.” Her creator defines her as a “rebellious, blunt, tough person who does not deceive and at the same time very endearing.” She is in her early thirties, with a slim build and a body covered in tattoos. She has a Russian mother and a Spanish father, she always dresses in black and suffers from hypohidrosis, a gland disease that prevents her from sweating. She is divorced and with family problems, be it with her son, her sister or her mother, besides not forgetting her little brother who committed suicide because of drugs.
“Since my first novel, ‘Under the ice’, I thought about going around the traditional stereotype of crime novels with a police couple in which he is more impulsive and she is more reflective”, indicates the author who points out that “I It seemed more interesting from the start to have strong women acting, like Irène Ziegler in ‘Under the Ice’ piloting a helicopter.” For this reason, he remarks that “I have always liked strong female characters” although it is not necessary to “simplify too much since I like complexity and nuances”.
What is clear is that “women are often stronger than men in my novels”, so it is not surprising that Lucía Guerrero is a revelation in Minier’s literature. That is why the French author is already preparing the second book in the saga next year “with new Spanish settings, such as Madrid.” He hopes that readers will become attached “to Lucía as much as they did to Servaz”, another way of uniting crime fiction beyond the Pyrenees.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
