Since it published its first installment, Puerto Escondido (2015), the series of books starring Civil Guard Lieutenant Valentina Redondo has become one of the best-selling books in Spain. Its author, also a lawyer María Oruña (Vigo, 1976), is now launching the fifth volume, –on sale this Wednesday 18– where the protagonist, who usually performs on the Cantabrian coast, leaves the peninsula for the first time, as she He stumbles upon a case while on vacation in Scotland, involving none other than the emergence of Lord Byron's memoirs, supposedly destroyed two hundred years ago but which may have turned up in a hidden room at Huntly Castle in Aberdeenshire. Oruña receives this newspaper at the headquarters of her publishing house in Barcelona, during a break from the marathon book-signing session that her readers have bought in advance.
Why does he take Valentina so far?
This woman needed a vacation, she lives too much stress and too much drama, both she and Oliver, her partner.
Here they are more affectionate, they kiss...
I wanted to undress them from their usual roles, they are on vacation and relaxed. I've taken off their uniform. We do not behave the same in the role we play in our office than when we are with the children or at a barbecue. In 2019 I visited the semi-ruinous Scottish castle of Huntley, which had belonged to the Dukes of Gordon (Oliver's family), and it seemed like a good place.
There is a parallel love story between a bookseller and a rich girl in the mid-19th century.
It starts as a romantic, then becomes a criminal and finally a judicial one. It is based on a true story that happened in Glasgow in 1857. There was a surprising crime and the justifications that were given caught my attention. I did some research and saw that you don't always know who is the wolf and who is the lamb.
The books here are very important. Especially those memoirs of Lord Byron...
The only thing that is not certain is that they have appeared. Although I am convinced that one day a file will come out...
Oh yeah?
Byron was sending them little by little to his friend Thomas Moore, and some of those fragments were swarming around London. Moore did the biography of Byron and I would find it very strange that he had not kept any of this material, not even a copy.
Why was at least a good part of those memories destroyed?
There are several theories. His ex-wife and the sense of modesty of the time could have had something to do with it. Also, perhaps, his publisher, who was already doing very well selling Byron's books and might have feared tarnishing his image. I use Byron because he needed a charismatic personality that would last over time. The works that have disappeared the most throughout history are humorous or satirical (as seen in The Name of the Rose), because they question power, autobiographies or memoirs, due to issues of privacy and secrets, and erotic .
Those seekers of literary treasures of his novel point out possibilities about Cervantes...
They dream of finding the second part of La Galatea, which in the preface to Persiles and Segismunda announces that it was preparing along with a play and a novel. There are other possibilities about Flaubert, or about Jane Austen, for example the outline of how she imagined ending Sanditon, her last novel, of which she only wrote a dozen chapters before she died. Or the end of Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which could have been the inspiration for Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I am convinced that there are things lost or asleep somewhere, drafts inside old books or even kept by private collectors. One day some will appear and the world will be surprised, it is something that has been happening with certain periodicity.
It is a very literary book, I mean in the sense that many works are cited...
I draw on Virginia Woolf's idea that narrative works and concepts add up and form a previous magma from which the authors of the present drink. Byron read Walter Scott thirty times, I read Byron much more, but I'm sure Scott comes to me filtered through him. We have only been innovating and mimicking from the classics. We are like a collective intellectual. That is why I honor that base that gives rise to the current narrative.
We see institutions peculiar to Scotland...
Like the heraldic Court of Lord Lyon, which continues to function in Edinburgh outside ordinary judicial authority, and brings peace to many conflicts. Or his legal system, which is the only one that includes three possible verdicts on a criminal charge: guilty, not guilty, and not proven.
Valentina, here, is not the official investigator, the case is being handled by a Scottish police officer.
That creates another type of novel within the series: as she does not have police powers or weapons, she must investigate like any neighbor's son, so we are in a domestic noir. The Scottish police, moreover, are not armed, which surprises us, but they have very strong concepts of fairness, justice and respect for the citizen, different from ours.
The books that ancient characters read, for example Don Juan or Pride and Prejudice, give them the codes for their love language. It's very obvious in them, but it's the same thing we do now, isn't it?
It is a mirror of what we do today: we see in the series the kind of love that we then covet. If we dream of princesses and castles, it is because they have put it into our heads. That yes, we have many sources and they had no more models than the books or the stories that their families told them.
The world of publishing appears, embodied in the character of Henry Blunt, who knows a lot about literature but his publisher lives by selling self-help manuals.
He also calls them 'self-care and introspection books', thanks to which he can continue publishing John Keats, Flaubert, Stevenson, Bécquer... Once in Barcelona, in 2016, I had coffee with an independent publisher and He said exactly that: yes, I do literature but I live from self-help.
And what about the hidden libraries?
I was inspired by a news story from 2017: in the Belgian town of Bouillon, a well-preserved library that had remained intact since the 18th century appeared behind a sealed door. And in the very Palace of Westminster, in 2020, they found a secret passageway from the 17th century that had been closed in the mid-19th century.
And what has he found out about Byron?
What caught my attention the most were his diaries, which reveal his personality: whimsical, extravagant, contradictory, determined, brave, macho... And, despite all his faults, absolutely captivating, he would enter a room and fill it. Why was it he who endured and not others? Charisma has to do with it. Polidori's journals reflect how he is absorbed into Byron's personality. When he died in Greece, that day, he stopped the world.
Another theme is the slab of domineering parents.
The fun part, I usually say, is the crime, but then there are others: the value of the story, of the books... and the psychological abuse, which can cause enormous fury.
It's hard to identify, isn't it?
Yes, because it is dramatized or made up with pretty words. The hardest thing is that they tell you something in a very kind or soft tone but that in reality they are sending you to hell. It is an abuse that is in all social, work and family profiles. And you can leave work, but not your family, or at least it's more complicated.
An abuse that is camouflaged as love...
The concept of love varies a lot according to the conveniences. The family is a bond that protects excessive and often lasting abuse over time.
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