The black novel in Catalan is going through a good time like we've never had before", says Àlex Martín Escribà, who is not only an expert but also directs the Crims.cat collection and has devoted several books to analyzing it , the latest, Interrogatories: Genere negre i memòria (Clandestine), published a few months ago and in which the author interviews some prominent writers. However, Martín also makes it clear that "we need to separate the wheat from the chaff, we have to be careful and sometimes we need to work more on the manuscripts". "The black novel has good health but without excessive euphoria", he says.
In addition to its collection, there is the specialized publishing house Llibres del Delicte, which stands out because it publishes only Catalan authors and gives a lot of impetus to writers, such as Anna Carreras, who has published three titles, or the col· class They are also black, with authors such as Ada Castells, Tina Vallès, Maria Climent or Irene Pujadas, among others. There are also collections in publishers such as Pagès (Lo Marraco Negre) and in generalists, such as the last work of Lluís-Anton Baulenas, Seré el teu mirall (Novel·la Santa Eulàlia prize, Comanegra 2023), without forgetting first swords like Ferran Torrent and the prolific Jordi Sierra and Fabra.
Martín points out that the most popular trend today is hybridization, especially with science fiction, as in Anna Maria Villalonga's latest novel, the futuristic dystopia Encara maten els cavalls (La Campana, 2023).
The diversification of spaces and the loss of urbanity is also important today, says Martín, with outstanding works such as Pigs, by Jordi Santasusagna (VIII Agustí Vehí Memorial Award, Crims.cat, 2021); Butsènit d’Urgell (Xandri, 2022), by Jordi Corbera, or Sota el fang (La Magrana, 2023), by Joan Roca Navarro, which open the scene of crimes in the rural environment.
Martín also believes that there is a "fever for the real facts". With books like those of today's bestsellers Carles Porta or those by Tura Soler and Narcís Bardalet or Fátima Llambrich. In fact, today, the Tiana Negra festival dedicates the first session to true crime. The festival, precursor to BCNegra, which will take place from February 5 to 11, will host until Sunday some of the main writers of the genre in Catalan under the direction of Anna Maria Villalonga for one more year. "It's important to find a way to make literature out of it beyond the simple chronicle of the reconstruction of the events", points out Martín, and gives the examples of Dead, who has died for you? (Comanegra, 2021), by Iñaki Rubio, or L’hivern del coiot (Crims.cat, 2020), by Ferran Grau, books that “should be studied even in high schools”.
In fact, Grau has just published a new book, Hiperrábia (Angle Editorial), which is based on real events but goes beyond literature. Based on the so-called "crime of the automatic teller machine", in which three boys killed Rosario Endrinal in December 2005 while she slept there, the writer pays homage to Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, not only for the language he invents -as the British writer creates nadsat he has created xeno, which abducted him to the point where he came to dream in this neolanguage-, but instead endows it with a fast-paced rhythm, with many popular and television references of Club Súper3 and changes Beethoven to Andrew Lloyd Weber to turn it into a “futuristic distortion”. "Three-quarters of what is explained in it is real, and there are even things that seem like a tribute to Burgess's book, like when I talk about reintegration after spending time in prison, and instead they are based on what one of the perpetrators of the murder told me", explains the writer, who got in touch to learn the facts first hand, and found a person there who "condemns what he did and who has tried to move forward".
The dean of the genre in Catalan, Andreu Martín, neither leaves the city nor adds science fiction or real facts -except if they are part of a historical setting-, but on the other hand he does try to make each novel that he writes is different from the previous ones, although he himself explains that "due to my age - 74 years - and the amount of books I have written - more than a hundred counting children's and youth work and collaborations - every time it costs more". Now he has published Allò que only les passa als othres (Crims.cat, in Spanish, Lo que only les pasa a los demás, in AlRevés), in which he puts himself in the situation of someone who does not directly belong to the criminal world, " because we know that there are corrupt cops, prevaricating judges, thieves and murderers, but we always think that, as the title says, that only happens to others". In the book "a lot of things happen, but his new anti-hero, a lawyer by profession who is going through a bad time, watches it from afar, a bit like it would happen to many of us". This distance is what cost him the most: "I move well in the action and the big wink, and I came to give it up twice, because I wasn't doing as well as I wanted, I was playing in the opposite field ". For the writer, "although I didn't want to reflect any specific event, every novel comes from real events, even the imagination, because reality gives us permission to write fiction". From his vantage point, he remembers that he comes "from the remote times when it was abnormal to write a black novel set in this country", and with authors "complexed that we needed to say that the genre was the best, and it was not true neither then nor now". "Today there are good black books, not so good and frankly bad, that is to say, cultural normality", he says, while thinking that it doesn't matter if it's fashionable or not: "If they do it well, welcome to the club".
