"The Mosso's suicide was shrouded in mystery."

Barcelona"I've made many attempts to retire, but I'm running out of ideas," he admits. Andreu Martín at the Obaga bookstore in Barcelona. The 76-year-old author has just published Everything was going well until now., his tenth book on crims.cat, a collection that he inaugurated with Story of death in 2012. This is the second time that Martín has written a novel with Joan Miquel Capell, who was a Mosso d'Esquadra (Spanish police officer) for more than three decades and currently teaches a course on organized crime and terrorism at the University of Barcelona.

"Joan Miquel has been my go-to police officer for years," Martín admits. "He has guided me in making my stories of thieves and night watchmen believable." After debuting with Wad-ras (La Magrana, 2018), which won the Crímenes de Tinta award, Capell wanted to continue writing and opted to partner with Martín, a method the novelist has put into practice on multiple occasions, such as with the Inspector Flanagan series of young adult novels, co-written with Jaume Ribera. "Contrary to what they say, writing a book with two hands doesn't involve half the work, but double," he comments. "But it's a splendid learning curve. What justifies this method is giving credit to the other author for everything they have to do more than you."

Suicide in the Police Force

Police officers (crims.cat, 2021) was the first fruit of their collaboration, and four years later it arrives Everything was going well until now."After all this time in the police, situations I've experienced have stayed with me," says Capell. One was the suicide of a Mozo d'Esquadra in the early 1990s. "His death was shrouded in a certain mystery," he continues. "The novel aims to question the police investigation of the time." Andreu Martín and Joan Miquel Capell like to construct fictions based on real events. "We distort the characters and situations that inspire the stories quite a bit because behind every death there is someone and their family," they explain.

The death from a gunshot to the head of Ballester, a Mozo d'Esquadra, serves to bring to the table a little-publicized topic: that of suicide in the police forces. "Every year, between 15 and 20 police officers commit suicide in Spain, and most of them use their own weapon," says Capell. "In the 1990s, when someone in the police force committed suicide, no one wanted to know anything about it. If you wanted to go to the funeral, you were forbidden from wearing that person's uniform. They were serving society for their job."

There's a second prominent plot in the novel, related to drug trafficking and prostitution. "It's what we know as Botox case "—Martín explains—"Once upon a time, there was a respectable woman who had a rich neighbor who one day confessed that her husband was a drug dealer. With the drug money, she could have bought a Volvo, had the most expensive appliances, or even had a breast job." After the confession, the respectable woman went to the police station and made them a peculiar proposal: "I'll be a police informant if they pay for my breast job."

Everything was going well until now. follows the investigations into another plot by the Mossos d'Esquadra (Spanish police), which was just beginning to spread across the country. One of the most shady scenes in the story is the Riviera Club in Castelldefels. "Whenever you saw it from the road, the parking lot was packed to the rafters, but on the other hand, it was a place everyone denied ever having been," explains Capell. "Life in these clubs had its peculiarities: in the book, we wanted to show how the girls lived and how they were treated," adds Martín.