The most horrible things can happen in the most beautiful places.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
19 May 2022 Thursday 07:21
10 Reads

The most horrible things can happen in the most beautiful places. Norman Scarf knows it. He is a writer and already has some stories, always based on reality, about heinous crimes that occurred in beautiful natural settings such as the Himalayas. Scarf is a character created by Jokin Azketa to promote a literature that unites the black with mountaineering. A character who starred in What the Snow Hides, Desnivel Award 2013, and who now returns to the other corner of the world, in Patagonia, with Life at the tips of the fingers (RBA).

"Norman is not a police officer, he is not a private investigator, he is just a writer who is looking for good stories and who does not try to do justice, he simply wants to find good material for his books," Azketa explains in an interview with La Vanguardia. Scarf recalls the Truman Capote who traveled to Holcomb to find out every last detail of the Clutter family murder and pour it into the pages of In Cold Blood.

"I would like to be Capote," jokes Azketa, who acknowledges that he did think of the American writer "when composing the character." That Scarf who travels to Patagonia when he learns that several girls have been hanged in the remote town of El Chaltén. There is a suspect, Jacob, who has already been arrested and remains in the local prison. Jacob arrived at El Chaltén determined to climb Fitz Roy, but the mountain defeated him. Is it his failure as a climber that has led him to murder innocent girls? Scarf doubts it, because he believes that Jacob is innocent and that the real criminal is still free on the streets of that small town that was once a haven of peace.

Although this is the second novel starring Scarf, it is already the fourth by the Pamplona-born author, whose works "are always set in a place of beautiful nature", although they have varied, because "the first, Where the Lesser Gods Live, was a thriller psychological, while Life at the tips of the fingers already looks towards the black". "We are used to black happening in unpleasant places, in uninhabited houses, in factories populated by rats, but I prefer to look for a beautiful setting that becomes another character in the book," he adds.

The novelist puts into the characters' mouths "what I write down in my travel notebook, because precision and geographical exactness are important." For Azketa, writing and traveling are a marriage: "if I haven't been to a place I don't write about it". El Chaltén is an old acquaintance of the author, who has visited it three times, and Fiz Roy, that mountain that Jacob crossed, "is almost a sculpture, which is very much alive in mountain mythology because it was not climbed until the 50's".

Thanks to his desire to travel the world, Azketa was able to make the leap to books. "I started writing in Altaïr magazine after one of those visits to Argentina, then I had a blog that got many visits and I saw the moment to fulfill my old dream of launching myself into literature, that's how Where the lesser gods live, which is brimming with ease , because I didn't think I could get to publish it". But the novel was published and now Azketa has been rewarded for his entertaining fusion of crime novel with nature by signing on for the RBA Black Series.


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