Consider the journalist and writer Mariano Sánchez Soler (Alicante, 1954) who has reached a "disturbing" age. The adjective may well describe the product of his double activity, literary and informative, since the crime novel and the chronicle of events have absorbed most of his time during the long years devoted to the craft of writing.
Meticulous and organized, Sánchez Soler maintains an extensive archive on some of the most significant crimes that he had to cover in the muddy terrain of the Events, which requires precision and surgical guts if one wants to emerge unscathed from the courts and the psychologist.
The escape route of the novel has allowed him to surpass in fiction the limits imposed by judicial truth, in valuable works that were inspired by his journalistic investigations, such as Para Mater (Yolanda González case), Nuestras own blood ( Dulce Neus case) or The murder of the Marquises of Urbina (Urquijo case).
Now he returns to those crimes and nine other gruesome matters that deserved headlines in five columns and flooded the screens in anticipation of the true crime fashion, but he does so by once again submitting to the corset of reality, rescuing summaries, testimonies, sentences... to offer an exciting sample of a society, the Spanish one, that gasped in search of fresh and free air in the swamp of post-Francoism.
"As in other previous works," he explains, "to write A Litter of Corpses I have resorted to judicial truth, to proven facts collected in sentences and official documents, contextualized and explained through primary, testimonial, direct sources." Sánchez Soler defines his work as "good intentional journalism. The objective of this book is for people to get closer to the truth in the clearest way possible. I have always been an author on the hunt for a story to tell and, as a journalist, "I have moved in areas where crime and politics reigned. That's tough."
Why return to stories already told? Why return to the crime scene? "I have chosen twelve cases that I wrote about at the time, that I investigated in some cases from minute zero, and I tell them chronologically so that I offer a vision of what has been a part of our society since Franco's death" .
The first, which affected him completely because he knew the victim, is the murder of the young Yolanda González, which occurred in Madrid on February 1, 1980, "a political crime, which we are still with this story, because they are issues that do not Have they died". The famous Urquijo Case continues - "which with current DNA recognition techniques could have clearly resolved whether or not it was Rafi who killed his in-laws -", and a crime "linked to 23-F, the death of Antonio Cortina , the father of José Luis Cortina, with the shadow of the conspiracy behind..."
In the selection, the author has been guided by his journalistic nose: "they are matters in which the crime does not occur and that's it, I have followed them in the chronology; for example, the book ends with the murder of Eduardo González Arenas, the corrupter of minors from the Edelweiss sect, which is a matter that occurred in the 80s, and he was killed in 1998."
'Leaf of Corpses' is a finalist for the Rodolfo Walsh award for non-fiction works of the noir genre that will be awarded by the Black Week in Gijón. Each of the twelve real crimes that make up the work exposes shadows that, like threatening specters, loomed over the Spain that was opening up to modernity: racism, corruption, the extreme right, sexual abuse...
Lucrecia Pérez, Santiago Corella -el Nani-, María Teresa Mestre, Paquito Reyes, Raymond Vaccarizi... were real people whose names are probably unknown to younger readers, but whose tragedies resonate in the memory of a generation. A black chronicle of which Sánchez Soler was a witness and chronicler, and which today he organizes and cleans up to fulfill a personal need: "to write them and return them to this wild world, for reflection and for life."
