The writer who invented the Catalan detective novel while looking for carrots

BarcelonaThe collection Crimes.es celebrates a major milestone, reaching issue number 100, with an exceptional volume, Barcelona, ​​a crime trilogy, which brings together the three detective novels by Rafael Tasis (Barcelona, ​​1906-Paris, 1966): A crime on the Parallel, The Valencian Bible and It's time to fold. According to its director, Àlex Martín Escribà (Barcelona, ​​1974), who holds a doctorate from the University of Salamanca with a thesis on the crime genre in Catalonia, it was worthwhile "returning to the origins of the genre" with this book, paying "recognition to Rafael Tasis, the person who opened its doors." For Àlex Martín, Tasis is "the Catalan Edgar Allan Poe."

Rafael Tasis and Marca He was a writer, columnist, translator, journalist, political activist, and literary critic. For years he ran the family bookstore on the Rambla dels Caputxins, a meeting place for Catalan intellectuals. Despite being very prolific in many literary genres (essays, criticism, and novels), he lacked higher education: "I've had to learn everything myself, through random reading, outside of work hours, without method, discipline, or basic knowledge," he confesses in a 1966 speech included by Martín in the introduction to the volume.

Tasis's foray into the crime genre took place in exile. "Due to political circumstances, he had to go into exile in Paris in 1939, and from 1939 to 1948 he had access to detective fiction and noir," explains Martín. In France, "he became a great reader of popular fiction and, in addition, came into contact with Ferran Canyameres, who had signed a contract with Georges Simenon to translate all his novels." But there was a problem: "Canyameres was unable to keep up with Simenon, who was publishing a novel every 15 days, and so he contacted a number of friends to help him translate the novels. And Rafael Tasis, in nine months [from December 1942 to August 1943], translated thirteen of Simenon's novels."

Exile in Paris

In 1944, while living in Paris, Tasis learned that he could get carrots in a nearby village to feed his family, and after an agonizing journey, he succeeded. On his return, an air raid siren caught him at a train station, and sitting there, he recalled a news report from years earlier about the death of a lottery ticket seller. That's how the story was born. A crime on the Parallel, his first crime novel. Shortly afterwards he wrote The Valencian Bible And, ten years later, It's time to foldHowever, the novels were published in reverse order: in 1960, 1955, and 1956. The Clandestina trilogy, "which had never been published in an omnibus edition," Martín recalls, orders the novels as they were conceived.

"Tasis's three novels are very Simenonian. That is to say, they are very urban and everyday." Martín argues that the trilogy's success lies, on the one hand, in its protagonists: "The tenacious, persevering, and rebellious Jaume Vilagut, a young police commissioner in the Cathedral district, courageous, not at all intellectual, and devoid of sentimentality," and Francesc Caldes, "a journalist-reporter, one of those journalist-reporters, an intuitive storyteller with excellent skills in observation and deduction," we read in the introduction. A duo that always follows the classic crime-investigation-resolution scheme and that can deal with stabbings (A crime on the Parallel), dead ( )The Valencian Bible) or robberies (It's time to fold).

The other great "encounter," in Martín's opinion, is the urban chronicle. The first two novels are set "in a Barcelona that Tasis, from exile, imagines before the traumatic years of the war." It's time to foldHowever, it moves on to the post-war period. Martín points out that the "topographical detail" allows one to see the evolution of the city and that the author "takes a tour through the streets, the avenues, describes the trams and also the cars... When you travel with Tasis through these three novels, you are traveling through the modernization of Barcelona."

In short, Martín recalls, "Tasis contains all the classic models of what would be considered detective literature: there is urbanity, there are the characters, there is local color and there is historiography, which I think are the four great pillars of these three novels."

15 years, 100 titles

Ilya Perdigo, editor of Clandestina – where the volumes of Crimes.es After a long stint at Alrevés, he takes on the task of recalling the collection's origins. It all began in 2011 with an anthology promoted by Àlex Martín and Sebastià Bennasar, featuring 17 stories by 17 different Catalan authors, entitled Crimes.esThen, Pérdigo continues, "Martín came to the publishing house one day and told us he felt the need to create the collection." The goal was to foster "a space, a framework, where authors who were already publishing crime fiction in Catalan, but doing so in a scattered way," could "grow and evolve."

"Although it may seem unbelievable today," the editor adds, "at that time there wasn't a collection of crime novels in Catalan as such. Obviously, we were coming from The Straw Tail [1963]But it hadn't existed for many years, and The Black Woman [1986], from La Magrana, neither." Fifteen years later, Crimes.es"While initially featuring Catalan authors, it has evolved and now also publishes international authors and Catalan classics." It is in this latter category that we find Someone who shouldn't have been there of Manuel de Pedrolo, Dear Mr. Prosecutor of Mauricio Serrahima And now, the Tasis trilogy. A similar initiative to that of Anna Maria Villalonga, who in 2018 compiled three of Pedrolo's crime novels into the volume In the shadow of crime (Editions 62). Among these pioneers of the genre, one essential figure is missing. "We can announce that in May we will publish Late afternoon, continuous session, of Jaume Fuster, To mark the 50th anniversary of its publication; it's a very experimental text, a beautiful homage to American film noir – Àlex Martín emphasizes. We can't continue with Crimes.es "Without a Fuster, because, along with Vázquez Montalbán, they pioneered the genre in the 70s and modernized it. They managed to create a second school after the precedents of Tasis and Pedrolo."