Silvia is a journalist and yesterday she traveled from Santander to Bilbao to cover the presentation of Dolores Redondo's latest novel, Esperando al diluvio. On the bus, a woman noticed what she was reading and wanted to buy the book from her. The avid reader wanted to dive right into her pages, though the novel will be out tomorrow. They're going to take the book out of Redondo's hands. And her publisher, Destino, knows it. She will release 250,000 copies of Waiting for the Flood and will reissue another 80,000 of previous titles by the author such as The Invisible Guardian or All This I Will Give You.
It is not for less, because Waiting for the flood is one of those books that are started and not left. Redondo has turned to a true story, that of John Biblia, who murdered at least three women in Glasgow at the end of the 1960s, to articulate a novel that is at once exciting, intriguing, disturbing and tender and that, although it begins in Scotland's main protagonist is Bilbao in the throes of the early 1980s. The author is aware that the subject of her new novel is a safe bet, because "murderers who have not been caught become legend," she says .
And no one knows who Bible John was. There are no photographs. There were never any reliable leads. The police never caught him. It is known that he had a boyish and pleasant face, although he was an ordinary guy. He murdered young women when they had their period and left tampax or compresses as a "trophy" for his crimes. "At that time, the police had a very small vision of the world, there were no women in their ranks and it was thought that John killed because his victims did not want to have sex with him, claiming that they were menstruating," explains the author.
But Redondo sensed that behind those horrible murders there was a much deeper motivation. So when he launched into a novel about the serial murders of John Biblia, whom he had heard about during a stay in Scotland as a teenager, he decided to consult a psychiatrist who was an expert on the subject and discovered that "behind the criminal there was a victim of abuse. sex during childhood.
"That made me change the way I was treating the novel," the author recalled this morning during the press conference for the presentation of Waiting for the Deluge. But even before taking that turn, Redondo was clear that her murderer was going to land in Bilbao in 1983 a few weeks before the great storm that changed the city, because when the author returned from that trip to Scotland she experienced the great deluge that devastated the Biscayan capital and in its head John the Bible and the flood have always gone hand in hand.
How does the Scottish murderer get to Bilbao? That is something that readers will discover in the pages of Waiting for the Deluge and that Redondo is not going to reveal right away, although he does give details of the city that John Biblia found: "He discovered a port similar to Glasgow with merchant ships, cranes, trucks and freight wagons where rats roamed freely and it smelled horrible", the author recalled yesterday during a boat ride with the press along the Nervión estuary, where 40 years later there are hardly any vestiges of that industrial and polluting past.
"That storm was the beginning of the new Bilbao," says the writer, who confesses to being a "lover of storms." "It rained for days and when the great deluge came, the old part of Bilbao was buried up to the second floor, the slopes of the mountains crumbled and chaos took over the city. 34 dead were counted. Bilbao became a landscape Dantesque and that prompted a solidarity movement that turned the city into the wonder we have now," said Redondo on that boat ride as he left behind him the Guggenheim museum, emblem of the new Bilbao.
The crimes of John Biblia and the Bilbao flood are the motor of the novel whose protagonist is detective Noah Scott Sherrington, who discovers the identity of the mysterious serial killer in the first pages and, following a hunch, decides to travel to Bilbao in search of him. Noah finds himself in that industrial and somewhat fearsome city, but it doesn't take long for him to feel welcomed and to find friends and shelter despite the fact that he knows that, due to illness, his days are numbered and he wants to dedicate them to finding the murderer and also to understand what it is what leads him to kill menstruating women.
"Redondo has drawn together with Noah a list of memorable secondary characters", explained his editor, Emili Rosales, during this morning's presentation. Maite, Rafa or Lizardo stand out among those secondary, but above all, Dr. Elizondo, a psychiatrist who helps Noah to trace the profile of the serial killer. Elizondo's life is marked by a tragic event in her childhood that creates concern in the reader. The author is aware and is already advancing that "Elizondo will once again be present in my novels and she could even be the protagonist of a future book."
