Élmer Mendoza (Culiacán, Sinaloa, 1949) visited the island yesterday to collect the prize that Tenerife Noir awarded him in 2020 and that he was unable to receive in person due to the pandemic: the Black and Criminal prize. He arrived with his latest book under his arm, a new adventure for his detective El Zurdo Mendieta: “She entered through the bathroom window.” “We have grown old together and in the pages of this novel it is more prudent,” he explains.
He visits us to collect the Tenerife Noir Black and Criminal award that was awarded to him in 2020 but that he had not been able to come get due to the pandemic. What does it mean to you?
I feel that it disconcerted me a lot because, in the end, one never knows the scope of his work. I was very disconcerted to receive an award here in Tenerife. This is the first time I come. It always takes a while to sink in and then it starts to feel really good. I mentioned it to my wife, in fact. You also realize that the people who give it to you are serious people and that Tenerife Noir is also a very serious project. I am very happy that Black and Criminal is part of my resume.
He is known internationally as the creator of narco-literature, a genre that could even be considered a dangerous terrain to uncover depending on what things…
The world of criticism has opened up that aspect in the study of the literature of violence that we are doing and that I began to do years ago. In addition to thematically, it has a treatment that they consider correct of what the subject is and what its most representative intimate manifestations are. I think there is also a desire for style, an attempt to incorporate elements typical of the regions and the people. We tend to become not only storytellers but we propose an aesthetic proposal that involves language, regional culture, cities also as characters and the definition of an era in time that these different regions are experiencing. And it turns out that it became more formal and more serious than I ever intended when I went into this. Then the critics appear and you see that they are better at defining and they find the different ones. The truth is that it is something that has flattered me a lot.
The Canary Islands and Latin America are closely linked socially and culturally. Is there a genuinely Latin noir? Are there characteristics that distinguish our writers in the field of crime novels?
Yes. Because I believe that the crimes that we work on are current, real and very difficult crimes. Many times they are crimes that define the crime of the time. Every society generates its criminals but in ours there is a variation that has to do with around 25 different types. The social decomposition that we are witnessing is very strong and, as a novelist, this is a constant provocation that those of us who like this genre and develop it have a hard time resisting.
«In detective novels, the ending is always a fundamental part of the creation»
He also comes to talk about She entered through the bathroom window, the latest novel by his iconic inspector El Zurdo Mendieta, which he also publishes with the Alfaguara label.
If you saw how I liked the edition, it is much prettier than the Mexican one. One of the aspects of contemporary crime fiction is that we are mixing things up. And not as alternate stories but as part of what is the bulk of the novel. This book has about ten chapters of eroticism but really, very elaborate. I did not work on it alone but with the help of women and that is very interesting because the two visions are mixed in those chapters. On the other hand, there is the issue that has to do with the strength of a type of drug gang that operates in the city and that at a given moment takes over it. A few years ago, in 2019, our city was taken over by the army because they were going to arrest a capo. Ten minutes later, a bunch of armed people showed up. Imagine: at two in the afternoon two very strong, cruel and bloodthirsty forces, and society in the middle. Imagine a father picking up his eight-year-old daughter from school when he had to jump off a bridge with the girl because he started hearing gunshots and didn’t know where they were coming from. Imagine the impact for that father and that daughter. That irritated us a lot and what I do in this novel is to typify some moments of that shot. There is an ex-military boss, a drug trafficker who hasn’t been operating for 20 years but who comes out of prison and remakes his gang. He brings to his heart an idea of cruelty even more intense than he had before he was imprisoned. On the other hand there is the erotic story. In the middle, El Zurdo Mendieta, who is investigating the murder of a commander and also investigating a case related to a man over 60 years old who met a girl in her 20s, a redhead. They have a love affair for a while and just as the redhead entered her house through a bathroom window, so she too disappears. He, when she is already dying in the hospital and has barely twelve days to live, looks for El Zurdo Mendieta to find her. There is not a single piece of information about her and then El Zurdo returns to his original teachings as a detective on how to mount an investigation and follow it to find a person of whom there is not a single clue. These two parts make up the novel and have an ending that we are not going to spoil for everyone to enjoy. In detective novels, the ending is always a fundamental part of the creation.
There is a very special relationship between the novelist and his detective, who in his case is the famous El Zurdo Mendieta. How has that character changed novel after novel and what is his relationship with him?
We have very deep differences and that is also a way of being related to someone. We also have important coincidences. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that we have grown old together and in the pages of this novel El Zurdo is more cautious. He uses more experience in the investigation, especially to sneak away from the Sicilian –which is the nickname of the bad guy– so that he doesn’t kill him. He suffers several attacks throughout the novel that are about to finish him off. I think in that aspect we are a bit alike and also in that we both like Whiskey. But he does have lousy luck with girls. He is very afraid of going back to the mother of his son, for example. I don’t, I lead a completely happy life in that aspect. I always think that he could come to our house for dinner and receive advice on what he has to do with Susana Luján to be well and dare to live with her. I think so, that there is a close relationship between the author and the detective.
