Black week for the black novel. If very recently the Basque author José Javier Abasolo left us, yesterday his Galician colleague Domingo Villar died, at the age of 51, the victim of a stroke suffered on Monday. In the antipodes of the fever for novelty, of urgency as a guide to writing, over thirteen years he published only three installments of his cycle dedicated to inspector Leo Caldas – Ojos de agua, La playa de los ahogados and El último barco –, a rare case of great literary rigor and sales phenomenon that garnered awards in Spain and was a finalist for highly prestigious foreign awards, with the second installment featuring a film adaptation by Gerardo Herrero.
In times of overabundance of crime novels, in which market dynamics invite the turnover of literary series at the rate set by the income statements of companies and in which the rush to publish among beginners spreads, Villar bet for patient work and he believed in self-demand, hence the sense of craftsmanship that his books conveyed: characters chiseled with care, plots that were never rushed, meticulous dedication to atmospheres. “The pressure is generated by not finding an adjective, not being satisfied with a dialogue, not knowing how to cut an excessive description, not finding the right voice to narrate a passage…”, she pointed out.
Method and content formed an indivisible unit. Calm and melancholy were distinctive elements of his cycle and, in the eyes of his literary specialty, tremendously subversive resources. Everything so well thought out, so well executed, generating interest without fanfare, transmitting emotions without a trace of manipulation. Years of effort, talent in abundance and maximum honesty towards the reader.
Behind the slowness of his stories, the bonhomie of Caldas and the literary quality of the whole, there were therefore extremely valuable messages encapsulated when it came to continuing with the task of continuing to dismantle annoying misunderstandings about the genre: crime literature does not have in the frenzy or in evil its cornerstones, entertaining is just one of its tasks, the space for reflection on the human condition that it can open up is unlimited, style can be one of its distinctive notes, etc.
More important than all this is that Domingo Villar was a person of overwhelming humility and closeness, of an evident shyness that never conflicted with attention or generosity. A lover of jazz –which he always listened to while he wrote– and of gastronomy, I met him at a dinner at the 2020 edition of the Granada Noir Festival and he was scaring away all my comments and doubts as a fan to repeatedly be interested in a modest essay of mine on the black genre (for him and for the evolution of a party in progress of his beloved Celta de Vigo), a subject on which he incidentally leaked, as if unintentionally, a capital erudition.
“I would say that the most characteristic trait of Leo Caldas is compassion. The recognition of the reader is only possible, in my opinion, when the characters have relief, humanity... Nothing connects people as much as emotion”, the author declared in an interview. Caldas, then, as a transcript of its creator and a mechanism with which to explore our nature and move us. Any reader who did not know him in person will regret that there will be no more cases of the inspector, all those who knew him, not being able to spend more time in his company (preferably where he most enjoyed: facing the sea in any corner of Galicia).
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