A scene has been repeated in Barcelona every beginning of February for more than 20 years. The streets of the city are filled with (literary) crimes and readers flock to the great festival of crime fiction in Spain. The nearly eighty authors summoned by BCNegra curator, Carlos Zanón, represent a heterogeneous sample of everything that the genre can give throughout the world. Three of them (SA Cosby, Jordan Harper and Richard Price) come from a superpower in serious authoritarian drift, with law enforcement deployed in the streets against its citizens and President Donald Trump playing Risk on the international board. His work, popular, solid in the literary and critical in the social, takes on a new dimension in this context. This newspaper has spoken with the three, in addition to their colleague Don Winslow and other voices, to explore the state of the art and discuss the relevance of the crime novel as a tool of social criticism.
“It seems to me that crime fiction represents the last great space for social change, because it offers a more specific, critical and artistic point of view,” reflects SA Cosby (Virginia, 52 years old), with special emphasis on “last.” Just published in Spain The king of ashes (Salamandra) a new incursion into the wounds of his country. In your noir From the south, Cosby portrays places in decay, rural areas with a sinister future and a present in which its citizens live among fear, uncertainty and violence. Whether a reformed thief in Damn asphalt (Motus) or a deputy sheriff in My Darkest Prayerhis characters, whom he refuses to call losers and prefers to describe them as beings “marked by loss,” are never entirely good, never entirely bad, and rebel against power and injustice. In this case, a family managing a crematorium that will have to fight against the rural mafia and their own ghosts to save their skin. His novels have been hailed by Stephen King and Dennis Lehane as the best of the world. noir contemporary.
From the generation of the latter is Don Winslow (New York, 72 years old). The author of a contemporary classic like The power of the dog It will not be in Barcelona, but it will be in bookstores with Final result (Harper Collins), a set of stories with the best of his criminal universe. Winslow celebrates the growing presence of minorities and women in the genre as a way to bring their struggles and experiences to literature. “The political or social role of the crime novel depends on the type of book. Whether it is a procedural or a cosy crime I would say that it does not play that role, and that it does not need it. But if we talk about novels more noirthen there is something of that, because in the end it consists of portraying the struggle of the individual against the machine, against the system,” says Winslow, who describes the political situation in his country as “exasperating and depressive.”
Richard Price (New York, 72 years old) is another of the literary stars of the Barcelona festival. Known by the general public as one of the creative minds of the series The Wireis the author of street and powerful works such as The unpunished o The Wanderers and an excellent portrait of New York at the beginning of the century, The easy life. The social view with crime as an excuse.
Now, 10 years after his last novel, he travels through those terrains again in resurrected lazarus (Random, like the previous ones), a criminal story following the collapse of a building in Harlem and the search for a missing person. “It is not a crime novel in itself, although it has all its ornaments,” clarifies Price, who does not see much room for literature as a weapon in this crisis. “My country is going through a very difficult time. In literary terms, World War I is considered to be that of poets; World War II is considered to be that of novelists; Vietnam is considered to be that of journalists. And with this presidency I believe that it is once again the time for journalism: only relating the facts directly can help us, because any other form of literature is too metaphorical and indirect.” Random editor Miguel Aguilar contextualizes his work in this way: “Within the noir genre and its innumerable threads, Price collects a tradition that goes back to James M. Cain or Dashiell Hammett—or as Henning Mankell said, to Macbeth by Shakespeare—in which the crime and finding the culprit is not the important thing, it only serves as an excuse to describe a community with its lights, its shadows and, above all, its grays.”
Authors such as Ivy Pochoda are also heirs of that tradition with those women (Siruela), Laura Lippman with The girl of the lake (Salamandra) or Attica Locke (black and southern author, like Cosby) with Texas blues (AdN). A small selection of writers and works from a much broader universe that have taken up the baton of Vera Caspary or Margaret Millar, pioneers of a genre that has always had deep North American roots.
In the end, the crime novel consists of portraying the struggle of the individual against the machine, against the system.”
Don Winslow
The United States has been exporting its vision to the world for decades. At the epicenter of this cultural machine is the city of Los Angeles, in which Jordan Harper (Missouri, 50 years old) places Silences that kill (Salamandra), a dazzling thriller about the sewers of the entertainment system, about how the stars are protected, about how a few manipulate reality for the benefit of the powerful. “Los Angeles is the most American of cities, a fractal of wealth and crime; America dreaming of itself; an amalgam of hope and greed, of violence and beauty. The infernal combination of wealth and ‘legitimate’ violence that shapes the city also shapes my country (and much of the rest of the world), so I don’t think my novels speak only of the city. In Los Angeles these matters are illuminated with the glow of neon and that is why this place is the epicenter of crime fiction.” James Ellroy, Michael Connelly and Raymond Chandler know it well and have demonstrated it well for decades.
Los Angeles is the most American of cities, a fractal of wealth and crime; America dreaming of itself; “an amalgamation of hope and greed, of violence and beauty”
Jordan Harper
Harper grew up in the Ozarks, an area of the Midwest marked by its natural beauty and a tradition of violence that dates back to the 19th century. His literary debut, The Education of Polly McCluskytook him to the most desert and cruel places in California to tell the story of an ex-convict father and his teenage daughter in the fight against supremacist mafias, a plot that concentrates several of the perpetual evils of his country: racism, drug trafficking, social injustices and unstructured homes, a huge prison population, the presence of weapons in daily life, etc. And the situation has only gotten worse since the beginning of Trump’s second term. “We need stories as powerful as a kick in the liver. The crime novel has the mission of showing a world that is more hidden in other forms of narration. I hope that my next novel, A Violent Masterpiece, “It is exciting and fun to read, but at the same time it sheds some light in the depths of the aggression that my nation is suffering,” he reflects.
Commercial success and social mission
The matter raised by the author is not trivial. The relationship between criticism and spectacle, between entertainment and social mission has always been very present in the genre. Carlos Zanón, responsible for the festival’s programming and the author himself of hard-hitting and poetic novels about the reality of Barcelona, puts it this way: “Their culture always has the same nerve and muscle. They know how to tell stories. That ease has to do with their own culture and education. There are always good books, now too. But at a time like this, I think the seams are more visible in terms of their positioning. Even the most countercultural of them does not directly place the system, the empire and the value of money above everything. In light of Trump, they seem like entertainment proposals, written to be adapted on the platform. They are the best, but not the bravest. And with Trump I forgive him less.”
There is room for reaction, however, through the literary. In All the Sinners BleedFor example, Cosby places a black sheriff in a Virginia county at the center of the plot, a true declaration of intent. This is how he explains it: “In law enforcement in the United States, black people are usually at the expense of white officers. I wanted to show a black person in a position of power.”
Winslow rounds off the analysis with a look back: “I think the genre has progressively shed its reputation as minor literature. But I have to say that I miss a little when they looked at us with condescension. It gave us strength as a collective and a rebellious spirit. I was once asked if, as a genre author, I felt in a ‘literary ghetto’. I answered: ‘Yes, and I love the neighborhood.’
The gang has grown. The crime novel in the United States has long since emerged from the ghetto and has been gaining literary quality, author after author, success after success. It is not strange to see these writers on the best-seller list, or on the best books of the year. Now the genre is looking for its place in the trenches of the dark America of the 21st century.