Santiago Díaz: “Readers know everything, so you have to trick them, deceive them” | Elementary | Culture | EUROtoday

Santiago Díaz (Madrid, 55 years outdated) wouldn’t write if he didn’t have enjoyable and make others get pleasure from his novels. It’s arduous to think about what he would do then as a result of, he says, he is not good for the rest: “You ask me to hang a painting for you and the wall falls down. I’m useless for anything else,” he tells EL PAÍS on a Tuesday on the finish of April in a central lodge in Madrid. His newest novel, The grasp (Alfaguara), has been in the marketplace for just a few weeks, positioned, just like the earlier ones, among the many high positions of the very best sellers. Díaz doesn’t conceal: “If you manage to make some better literature or leave a mark, great, but my goal, my ambition and my goal is for people to have a good time. I look for spectacular moments and unexpected twists.”

The grasp It is the second installment of the sequence of thrillers starring Jotadé, a gypsy police officer with a peculiar idiosyncrasy who drives an ’89 Cadillac Eldorado via Madrid. He and his crew have to research the demise of a younger lady who disappeared years earlier than, against the law that’s associated to different earlier ones, all with a standard perpetrator: Inspector Pedro Osborne. Let nobody be scared or outraged by the disembowelment: the reader is aware of the assassin from the final pages of the earlier novel and follows his steps on this one, forward of the police. Díaz acknowledges the sport, the thought of ​​placing readers within the pores and skin of the prison, of agreeing with them in a dangerous guess, of searching for rigidity and nervousness in different assets.

The plots of this screenwriter turned crime novel creator at all times stream in the identical means, with nice craftsmanship. There is one thing enveloping, a form of ambush: “As a scriptwriter in a series you have to go to a specific moment of what you want to show, because you don’t have time, because you don’t have money; in a novel you can recreate aspects that may interest you in the psychology of the characters and take the reader by the hand, preparing the unexpected twist. The readers know everything, so you have to trick them, deceive them,” he says.

As within the earlier installments, the dizzying motion and a narrative that generally travels very near the restrict of verisimilitude are the 2 nice traits of the e-book. “There are three lines that I try to get as close to as possible without going overboard so as not to cause rejection: humor, sex and violence,” he acknowledges. Indeed, Díaz’s novels are violent, generally excessive (torture, eviscerated corpses, abuse of minors…), direct heirs of the trail opened in Spanish prison fiction by Carmen Mola, a trio of which her brother Jorge Díaz is part. “The Mola went too far, but people loved it,” he summarizes.

His character Juan de Dios Cortés, alias Jotadélives between two worlds. This is how the creator defines it within the police officer’s introductory letter: “Being a gypsy closes many doors in the payo world, and, if you are also a police officer, the doors are also closed in your own community. Jotadé Cortés is not ashamed of being neither one thing nor the other, although, eliminating one of them from the equation, his life would be much simpler.” When talking at size with Díaz shortly after studying the novel, an odd impact is produced, as if the 2 characters overlapped. “It’s like me, but without filters,” he admits. “My friends tell me what a badass, that I have created a character that is very close to me: foul-mouthed, lover of bad jokes, folksy…” Also loyal and trustworthy, one of many nice values ​​of the novel, which has been nicely obtained by the gypsy neighborhood. “They only tell me that there is something unthinkable: that clowns and gypsies like him equally,” he admits with a frank smile that doesn’t emerge all through the interview.

The motion takes place virtually fully in Madrid, however do not search for nice descriptions or atmospheric approaches, nothing that distracts the reader from the infernal tempo. Two traits spherical out Díaz’s guess: humor and good dialogue. With the primary, he argues, it’s about lightening, not prolonging for nearly 400 pages a rigidity that may then lose its impact, however with out falling into caricature, particularly with the protagonist. Through the dialogues, however, he provides fluidity to the plot, that turning web page after web page with out relaxation that worries him a lot: “I’ve been doing it all my life and it was my strong point as a screenwriter. I like it because with one sentence you can reveal everything. But they have to have structure and a meaning in the story,” he explains, comfy in his speech, virtually with out shifting that physique that’s shut to 2 meters.

Several parallel plots enrich the principle one and handle the way forward for different characters who, like Jotadé, have been born in Indira, Díaz’s earlier trilogy, a real turning level in a profession launched since then. In one in all them we meet a younger man who represents absolute evil, a demon made flesh, described with an virtually inconceivable level of evil, however managed to hook him. “With a bad guy anything goes, you can let yourself go: the only thing you’re going to get is that they hate him more and love the protagonist more,” says this creator, who factors out a sure tendency to procrastinate as his nice defect, though he has been including a novel annually to his bibliography for a while now.

The character of Indira Ramos contained the expiration date in her personal situation; she was a really explicit police officer who, along with her abrupt ending, stated goodbye within the third novel. It just isn’t ordinary in sequence throughout the style, however Díaz was clear about it: “I prefer that they miss it than that they miss it too much.” Now, realizing the enterprise, he admits that he was not going to have the ability to cease there, that they weren’t going to depart him, it’s the worth of success – ask Arthur Conan Doyle if not when he needed to resurrect Sherlock Holmes – and that’s the reason he started to attempt Jotadé as a secondary position. Now, the one gypsy policeman within the black-criminal scene flies alone in direction of the third novel within the sequence, already within the writing course of. Will there be extra or will it additionally stay a trilogy? “I wouldn’t mind doing a fourth one if I can think of a case that deserves it, but I don’t want it to take too long. I want people to read them all and still have fun.”