"What would happen if a great detective came to Barcelona to solve a crime?" asked Sylvia Lagarda-Mata (Barcelona, 1961) by her friend Miquel Mora. Said and, after a few years, done, with a novel that, in addition, has just won the II Santa Eulàlia Prize for Novels about Barcelona: Veus de mort als Encants Vells (Comanegra), which tomorrow arrives in bookstores. And who is the detective? Well, no less than the first in literature, the Auguste Dupin created by Edgar Allan Poe in The Crimes of Carrer de la Morgue in 1841. Lagarda-Mata, however, not only makes him the protagonist, but for the plot uses what could be the first serial killer: the murderous bookseller of Barcelona, which was published as a true fact - and by an anonymous author - in 1836 in the Gazette des Tribunaux, and which was echoed in pens like those of Jules Janin and Charles Nodier, and even a very young Flaubert. Here, however, it did not arrive until Ramon Miquel i Planas translated and adapted Flaubert's version and later made it his own, in 1928 (La legenda del libreter assassí de Barcelona), which a few years ago was still refishing Marcel Fité in the novel La veritable histoire del libreter assassi de Barcelona (Editions of 1984, 2020).
According to the jury, made up of Francesco Ardolino, Llucia Ramis, Enric H. March, Jordi González and Alba Cayón, "the text maintains a literary game with two great historical references combined in an original and believable way", and highlights "the meticulous work of archival documentation and the ability to transfer the information into a detective fiction story, with phantasmagoric touches, set in mid-19th century Barcelona", in addition to "the recreation of a map of the city rich in social nuances, economic and political", without forgetting "a special mention to the construction of characters, dialogues and transitions that hint at great stage and cinematographic potential". And it is that one of the objectives of the award, with an endowment of 25,000 euros, is, as Fèlix Riera, director of Àfora Focus Edicions - convener of the award with Comanegra publishing house - has said, "to go beyond the written text and make synergies with theater and audiovisual”. For Riera, "everything is literature in the city of Barcelona", to explain that the award this year also consists of a photograph by Francesc Català-Roca in which a child looks at the window of a bookstore. According to the publisher Jordi Puig, in addition to being "the perfect cocktail for the award", between history and the criminal chronicle, the novel "broadens the map of the Barcelona of the time". A plan that takes the protagonist to the Rambla, of course, but also to the Encants - the oldest in Europe, since they date from the Middle Ages -, then around the current Plaça de Correus, but also passes through the Plaça de l'Oli, or the barracks of the Vinyeta, in Montjuïc, the vaults of Cirés or the hospital of the Santa Creu, and even in the historic anatomical theater of the current Royal Academy of Medicine of Catalonia
The author, an expert in the history of the city, does not limit herself to placing Dupin in the city to solve some crimes, but rather traces a life's journey "filling in the gaps left by Poe, which are many". Thus, on the one hand, he makes him grow up in Perpignan, so that he has no problem getting along with the people of Barcelona, and on the other hand, he insists a lot on his relationship with the American writer, an ambiguous relationship that amplifies from a passage in which Poe describes them "walking through the night of Paris arm in arm".
The writer explains that "Barcelona has cyclically been a fashionable city in Europe, as it was in 1840", when she places the plot, a convulsive era with turmoil and a lot of tension. "We Catalans are very reluctant to throw foils at ourselves, we love the Victorian London of Jack the Ripper, but Barcelona gives a lot of themselves and deserves this game", asserts Lagarda-Mata, who without denying that he does not want to close the novel in the historical or noir genres.
Although she had been working on the novel for "many years", the existence of the prize spurred her to finish it and focus it geographically, so that "the reader can be transported with a time machine to a city imprisoned by the walls".
