In January 2005, as part of the celebrations
for the Year of Books and Reading, the most prominent European
crime writers were invited to Barcelona. Over three days around
20 authors – among them Donna
Leon, Lorenzo Silva, Francisco González Ledesma, Thierry Jonquet,
Petros Márkaris, Andreu Martín and Alicia Giménez
Bartlett – came together in round tables, lectures and conversations
to reflect on their books and the genre they belong to. One of the
main topics of discussion at the conference, which will be repeated
in February this year, was the role of the crime novel within the
European cultural product. Since authors such as Manuel Vázquez
Montalbán, Jean-Patrick Manchette or William McIllvaney reinvented
the crime novel in the 1970s, replacing imitative references to American
models by introducing critical and social content, the crime novel
on the Old Continent has typically been an effective instrument for
defining societies, analysing topical issues and recording the changes
experienced by its nations. All this in a rapidly changing environment
that has already seen the collapse of communism, the fall of the
Berlin Wall, the end of the Mediterranean dictatorships (Portugal,
Spain and Greece), consolidation of the European Union and the problems
of modern democracies becoming more and more widespread. That is
how we know more about Italian, Greek or Swedish society through
the writing of Camilieri, Márkaris or Mankell than from what
we are told by bankrupt government communication policies aimed at
promoting multiculturalism and disseminating the benefits of the
European Constitution. In many of the papers and discussions assembled
in this book stress is laid on the need to promote culture as the
EU's basic integrating dimension at a time when we are reflecting
in an interesting and informative way on the specificities each national
literature offers in the area of the crime novel.
As well as presenting documents and
conclusions from the workshops, the book includes, by way of epilogue,
the texts that were read in Barcelona Town Hall at the event in
the course of the conference where homage was paid to Vázquez Montalbán
18 months after his death. Official figures, relatives and professional
colleagues spoke about the Barcelona writer, whose memorial is
completed in the book with the inclusion of Antes de que el milenio nos separe (Before
the millennium divides us), a dramatic monologue with hints of Unamuno
in which Pepe Carvalho pays his dues to his creator and prophesies
both their ends: Milenio I: Rumbo a Kabul (First millennium:
off to Kabul) and Milenio II: En las antípodas (Second
millennium: in the antipodes) were the iconoclastic detective-cum-gourmet's
last two adventures before his author's death. Sadly the millennium
did divide them.
