What does Barcelona mean for you?

Barcelona is at the same time both the territory where my memory is formed and the place with which I have a relationship of  knowledge
like that of a dog when he urinates in the four corners. He's marked his territory. Given that it's a city with many layers, it could be said that it is a various city in one, as I tried to show in my book Barcelonas, a book which has been translated into English. In books like The Pianist which are not part of the Carvalho series, Barcelona is primarily the city of the hidden memory, thanks to the civil war, while in the Carvalho cycle of books, it is the setting in which is created the conflict with crime, and sometimes, between politics and crime.

What drew you to crime writing? How important is it for you?

Convinced that the bourgeoisie and its associated literary genre, the novel, had died or was on the point of dying, I began to write experimental novels, in a desire to break with the classical unities, and Carvalho appeared for the first time in I killed Kennedy, a novel which we might call vanguardist.

Years later, in the 70s, I realized that both the bourgeoisie and the novel were two corpses which were enjoying excellent health. Accordingly, I dedicated myself to a type of novel-chronicle, inspired by the North American crime novel, but with key transgressive elements. Mystery was the least of it. What interested me was the voyage of inquiry into an era, a voyage based on the complicity between reader and writer. I was interested in describing not only the Spanish transition from Francoism to democracy, but the global transition from the birth control pill to sexuality according to the Polish Pope, or from hippy pacifism to the war of the galaxies.

Is there a history of crime writing in Spain?

It had conventional origins linked to the post-Romantic urban mystery novels, and did not undergo an evolution in tandem with/similar to the great British, North American or French detective writing. In the early 1950s there was an important contribution by Mario Lacruz linked with French existentialism; later there was a type of police novel focused on  local or regional customs and manners written by García Pavón; and then in the 70s Jaume Fuster, writing in Catalan, and Andreu Martín and I in Spanish, initiated new styles with literary ambitions. The success of the Carvalho series has depended to a large extent on the fact that the reader has not considered them to be purely detective fiction.

How did Pepe Carvalho come about?

I needed a bodyguard for Kennedy who was of Spanish origin, a former communist and sceptic who would eventually be convinced that it was he who had killed Kennedy. Four years later (1974) that character, Pepe Carvalho, was transformed into a private detective.

How was he received critically in Spain?

The reaction was one of total bewilderment. I was seen as a poet, journalist, essayist and writer of experimental novels, and suddenly they thought I had switched to a commercial genre. Wrong. There was virtually no reading public for the type of detective fiction I was writing. Things changed when I won the Planeta Prize in 1979.

What did you hope to achieve by creating him?

Solving the problem of point of view, critical in the relationship between the literary and the historical. A private detective is a voyeur, that is, a novelist. He had to be a private detective because post-Franco Spain retained a fascist appreciation of the police.

Why does he burn books?

It's a cultural sarcasm deriving from the supposedly low culture nature inherent in the detective genre. Moreover, it allowed me to play a few small cultural jokes: burning the Quijote or The Theory of Life by Engels. On one occasion Carvalho burns an anthology of erotic Spanish poetry whose editors had lacked the good sense to include me.

How much of him is you?

We have fairly common political, historical and family (personal) experiences, but he's taller and more handsome than me, and has become a total nihilist. I haven't yet.

One of the lectures you are presenting on your forthcoming tour is entitled The Myth of the Spanish Crime Novel. Can you say briefly what this covers?

Specifically, I will try to explain the real trajectory of the supposed Spanish detective novel which turned into an editorial "boom" and which today has regained a certain 'tranquility'. The most important thing is that the recuperation/recovery of the 'sort of' detective novel has influenced the Spanish novel as a whole. In the long run, any novel, from The Satyricon to Madame Bovary, is based to a greater or lesser extent on the violation of the three taboos: don't kill, don't steal and don't covet your neighbour's wife. •