The king of the French thriller, Bernard Minier (Béziers, 1960), has Spanish roots. The mother of the author of Under the Ice and The Circle was born in Alto Aragón, near Graus, and she emigrated to France at the age of eight with her grandmother in search of a better life. Now in his new novel, Lucía (Salamandra), Minier –five million copies sold in France, translated into 27 languages– revisits his roots, but goes much further. Beyond geographically, because Lucía's plot – triggered by the grim murder of a civil guard with a crucifixion included – takes place between Alto Aragón, Segovia and Salamanca, a city where she has just presented her to the Spanish press as she did a year ago. with the French one: he wanted to set his new novel in one of the oldest universities on the continent and Oxford and Cambridge already had enough crimes, he smiles. And on top of that, he discovered that the Castilian city is an open-air museum.
But it also goes further literary because, leaving for the moment his usual investigator, Commander Martin Servaz, but not the macabre crimes, nor his investigation of evil, Minier has created a Spanish heroine who will star in a police series: the tough lieutenant Lucía Guerrero, from the central operational unit of the Civil Guard, the UCO, to which the murdered man also belongs.
Lucía, together with a professor of criminology at the University of Salamanca, Salomón Borges, who has invented a computer program to detect common patterns in crimes, and with some of her students, will launch after the murderer when they discover, thanks to the program , who has already killed before in the same macabre way, imitating Renaissance and Baroque paintings inspired by the harsh scenes of Ovid's Metamorphoses, of which the protagonists will have to track down multiple editions in Salamanca.
"The Metamorphoses is one of the most violent texts in literature," says Minier. “There are rapes, murders, torture. Filomena is raped by her brother-in-law, who rips out her tongue to prevent her from telling her sister. The authors of crime novels stay far away. The noir begins with Medea, with Oedipus Rex, Antigone, with Cain and Abel, we have not invented anything, crime has been in literature since the first steps, since Gilgamesh”.
And he remarks that the presence of evil in his novels is not only aesthetic: “I am a sadistic author, it is true that I have a good time writing horrors. But then the main theme that runs through my novels is evil. And it's not just asking why it exists, but the different levels of evil. There's absolute evil, a serial killer, but who's to say he's never done anything wrong? We all have. The question is how we react, what we do, what we learn from it, how we live with the presence of evil around us. These are themes that obsess me and always come back in my novels. Entertaining, but the question is obscure”. Childhood is another of the central themes of the book: "We never heal from childhood, it follows us all our lives, it is always here, it follows us until death," he sums up.
And of course, the other subject is Spain, a country to which, he remembers, he gave himself fascinated at the age of 20 in full swing at a time, he remembers, of discovery, sex, drugs and rock and roll: "I lived the youth that I was getting into politics like never before." Today he says that the transformation of the country is enormous and that it functions as a mirror of so many issues in France. “Spain has many achievements, I would like my country to find out about that, but they already know it. When I speak of the University of Salamanca, of these students, of these faculties, one sees a country that is moving forward despite all the problems and crises. And above all I hope that in the end my novel can be read as if it had been written by a Spanish author, that is my goal, not as a French speaking about Spain. I want to be part of the Spanish black novel ”, he concludes.
