Snippet: Planeta prize to Giménez Bartlett

This year’s winner of the Planeta prize, Alicia Giménez Bartlett, has been featured as a crime novel author on this blog before, cf. these posts from 2014 and 2015. (As to the Planeta prize, cf. the Wikipedia article here.)

This year’s winning novel is entitled Hombres desnudos [Naked men], the story of a fatal couple relationship that started in the world of male prostitution. The runner-up, always rumored to be the better book and still endowed with 150,000 EUR, is the film director Daniel Sánchez Arévalo’s La isla de Alice [Alice’s island], where a woman tries to reconstruct the mysterious death of her husband.

Alicia Giménez Bartlett  (Almansa, Albacete, 1951) is an established crime novel author from before this genre became fashionable. The 10 novels around the inspector Petra Delicado have been very successful internationally (they have been translated into 15 languages and won prizes such as the Raymond Chandler one). In Spain it became popular due to a TV series.

Daniel Sánchez Arévalo (Madrid, 1970) is a movie scriptwriter, producer and director. He has directed various short films and four movies: Azuloscurocasinegro [Darkbluenearlyblack; 2006], Gordos [Obese; 2009], Primos [Cousins; 2011] and La gran familia española [The great Spanish family; 2013]. As a writer he has published two juvenile books: La maleta de Ignacio Karaoke [Ignacio Karaoke’s suitcase] and 31 de junio de 1993 [31 June 1993]. Since 1995 he has worked as a scriptwriter, starting with TV series. For his scripts of Gordos and La gran familia española he was nominated for the Goya [read Spanish Oscar] for best screenplay.

SOURCE: article by Carles Geli in El País, Oct. 15, 2015

Snippet: 29/01 – 07/02: BCNegra 2015 – 10th edition of Barcelona Crime Novel Week

Due to the success of its past editions, the organizers have changed the venue of most of the events to accommodate bigger audiences; the 10th edition of Bcnegra [“Black Barcelona”, as the genre is called “novel·la/novela negra” in Catalan/Spanish] will take place at the Conservatori del Liceu. The event will start with the award of the revived Crims de Tinta [Ink crimes] prize. The Pepe Carvalho prize (no money) will be awarded on 5 February to Alicia Giménez Bartlett, according to Núria Escur, La Vanguardia, “currently the country’s most relevant crime author.”

The most important international authors who present their works there this time are Sue Grafton, Philip Kerr, Zygmunt Miloszewski and Anne Perry. Among the local names that have been reedited, are still working, or have been discovered recently are Carlos Pérez Merino, Belén Gopegui, Lluís Llort, Toni Hill and David Llorente.

This blog will try to present them and their works individually in case it hasn’t done so yet.

SOURCE: La Vanguardia (printed edition), Jan. 28, 2015, pp. 30-31

Spanish (and Catalan) “femicrime” authors

An article by Carles Geli written in the context of BCNegra 2014 presented femicrime authors and their detectives and discussed the differences of crime novels written by female authors in comparison with traditional (male) crime fiction. Some insights are reproduced here:

Spanish and Catalan authors and their recent works (if mentioned):

Alicia Giménez Bartlett (Almansa, 1951; Wikipedia), a pioneer on the Spanish scene with her detective Petra Delicado: 9 novels so far, three novels available in English (according to amazon.com);

Berna González Harbour (Santander, 1965; a journalist with a managing position at El País), Margen de error [Error margin], investigator: María Ruiz, tech-savvy;

Dolores Redondo (San Sebastian, 1969; homepage), Legado en los huesos [Legacy in the bones], detective: Amaia Salazar, cf. post.

Rosa Ribas (El Prat de Llobregat, 1963), comisaria Cornelia Weber-Tejedor;

Teresa Solana (Barcelona, 1962), La casa de les papallones [The butterfly house], investigator: Norma Forester;  first Spanish writer nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe awards, four titles in English available on amazon.com;

Anna Maria Villalonga (professor at U of Barcelona), Elles també maten [They {women} also kill], a study of the phenomenon.

Principal differences in comparison to male authors:

Less gore and fewer entrails. Detectives more concentrated on the details of daily life. Crimes with a social background. A bigger interest in the motivations behind the crime, the human and psychological dimensions, than in the details of the crime itself. Female murderers have different motivations than male ones: self-defence (of themselves or their families) or vengeance for suffering in the past. In general, the female detectives are not as burdened with alholism, smoking and (other) autodestructive behavior as their male counterparts. They are often “special” as to their ethnic origin, sexual behavior, education, … sometimes “exotic”. Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander is presented as a positive example.

In comparison with the Nordic countries, there are few Mediterranean female crime fiction writers. The experts consulted by Geli see the reasons for this in the Catholic tradition and, in the case of Spain, in the long lasting dictatorship that prevented authors such as P.D. James from being read (and emulated) there. In contrast to this there are a lot of male Spanish authors that have female protagonists, though Giménez Bartlett criticizes them for being created as either “vamps or über-intelligent, totally archetypical”. Female authors tend to portray their male detectives as less violent than male authors. And one still ubiquitous phenomenon: the victims are female.

Sources: El País Jan. 31, 2014 + cited websites