"My books are like an exorcism. But everything is fake, like a horror film". "In my novels, the good cops are almost always as bad as the killers, because that way they know better the territory they tread on." These are some of the statements made by Jean-Christophe Grangé when he came to Barcelona in January 2005 to participate in the First European Meeting of Black Novels, the nucleus from which the BCNegra festival emerged. Grangé, at the time at the top with his novel Los ríos de color púrpura, brought to the cinema by Mathieu Kassovitz with Jean Reno in the main role – and more recently a television series – claimed a gothic and murky polar opposite to the will of social impact of other participants in that meeting, such as Petros Màrkaris, Jacob Arjouni or Paco González Ledesma.
The French author, who has been a great bestseller, strives to show the darker currents in the personality of his characters. His work was a pioneer in the trend of the "traumatized researcher" so characteristic of our time. In his latest novel, Muerte en el Tercer Reich (Destino), the protagonists are a short, sudden and conceited psychoanalyst, an aristocratic and alcoholic doctor and a sinister member of the Gestapo. Three improbable detectives to clarify the murders of ladies who frequent the Adlon Hotel in Berlin in 1939.
Psychoanalysis is a good ally of the police genre, as we already saw in the novels of John Katzenbach or Gabriel Rolón; here, all the murders had undergone the therapy of the sneaky Simon Kraus. With an extension that could have been reduced, the plot is adorned with a competent period reconstruction. And it brings to the black genre the dilemma raised by Jonathan Littell's Benignes: to what extent is it ethical to favor narrative empathy with individuals as morally despicable as Nazi agent Franz Beewen?
In a galaxy far, far away, empathy with the character shifts to Ann Sitwell, a young art historian who arrives to do her summer internship at The Cloisters, the extension of the Metropolitan Museum of New York at the northern end of the city, famous in these latitudes because it houses the cloister of Sant Miquel de Cuixà, brought there in the 1930s by the merchant George Gray Barnard and acquired by the tycoon John Rockefeller (acquisition, let it be said in passing, about which there could be quite a lot of discussion according to standards current).
In Los claustros ( Plata Editores ) we soon perceive the young Ann as a not entirely reliable narrator, who hides information and maintains an ambiguous relationship with the gardener Leo and with the curator Patrick, obsessed with a Renaissance tarot deck. This acclaimed first novel by Kathy Hays, a professor of art history in California, has been said to have an air of Donna Tartt's The Secret, but it reminded me more of The Goldfinch of the author herself, with that ability to generate a sophisticated atmosphere with magical tones from characters and environments loaded with cultural references.
And another work of suspense with an artistic background is the
Can a master spy be at the same time an admirable restorer of the old masters of painting? The laws of fiction allow it. And in this category
