The king of the French thriller, Bernard Minier (Besiers, 1960), has Spanish roots. The mother of the author of Bajo el hielo and El círculo was born in Upper Aragon, near Graus, and 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. More geographically, because the plot of Lucía - triggered by the tragic murder of a civil guard with crucifixion included - takes place between Upper Aragon, Segovia and Salamanca, a city where he has just presented it to the Spanish press as he did a while ago a year with the French woman: she wanted to set her new novel in one of the oldest universities on the continent and Oxford and Cambridge already had enough crime, she smiles. And on top of that he discovered that the Castilian city is an open-air museum.
But it also goes further literary. Without Commander Martin Servaz, the usual protagonist of his works, but continuing with the taste for macabre crimes and the question of evil, Minier has created a Spanish heroine who will star in an entire police series: the tough lieutenant Lucía Guerrero, of the unit operative center of the Civil Guard, the UCO, to which the assassin also belonged, his occasional lover.
La 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 some of his students, will set out to find the killer when they discover, thanks to the program, which 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", assures 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 black novels stay far away. Noir begins with Medea, with Oedipus the King, Antigone, with Caïm and Abel, we have not invented anything, crime has been in literature since the first steps, since Gilgamesh.
And he points out that the presence of evil in his novels is not only aesthetic: "I'm a sadistic author, it's true that I have a great time writing horrors. But then the main theme that runs through my novels is evil. And it's not just considering why it exists, but the different levels of evil. There's absolute evil, a serial killer, but who can say he's never done a bad thing? We've all done it. The question is how we react, what we do, what we learn, how we live with the presence of evil around us. These are subjects that obsess me and always return to my novels. Entertaining, but the issue is dark." 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 summarizes.
And, of course, the other subject is Spain, a country to which, he remembers, he gave himself up fascinated at the age of 20 in full swing in a whole year, he remembers, of discovery, sex, drugs and rock and roll. He says that today the transformation of the country is enormous, and that Spain functions as a mirror of so many issues in France. "And it has many successes, I would like them to know about it in my country, but I think that, in fact, they already know. When I talk about the University of Salamanca, about these students, about these faculties, we see a country that is moving forward despite all the problems, despite the crises. I hope that in the end my novel can be read as if it had been written by a Spanish author, that's my goal, not like a Frenchman talking about Spain. I want to be part of the Spanish black novel", he concludes.
