Versatility is a great virtue that allows the good writer to move between different genres and areas of creation. Andreu Martin He is the paradigm of a versatile creator. Andreu can be distinguished as a screenwriter, director, columnist and writer. But in addition, in his work as a writer he has also dared to use comics, the youth genre, erotic narrative and crime novels.
Without a doubt, an ability to change registers that reveals diverse creative concerns and an overflowing imagination to carry it out. If in addition the author ends up monopolizing awards in different genres, it will be because he also does it well.
And as for tastes are the colors, the aspect in which Andreu Martin's work attracts me the most is in that foray into the black gender. Andreu's crime novels usually have very particular plots, as if deep down he was busy caricaturing the genre. A point of satire and another of humor, relocation of the genre from the cities to any other place where people are also killed and done well, in addition to much more exquisite reasons.
So, you see that my selection of the best novels by Andreu Martín is going to be mediated by my greater taste for his black genre narrative, but who knows, you may still be surprised in the order of my predilections ...
Top 3 best novels by Andreu Martín
If you have to kill, you kill
As I have already anticipated, I really liked this author's search for novelty, for the new scenario, for the argument that generates new aspects in a black genre full of stereotypes after decades at the top of sales...
Detective Ángel Esquius travels from Barcelona to the bottom of the world (a town in the Pyrenees) to investigate a case of extortion involving a poor millionaire widow who lives in that town amidst lascivious looks, envy (if not outright hatred). . The neighbors know that the widow is not as innocent as she thinks, they all guess in her the most spurious of her interests.
From the talk about the life and work of the young widow and her deceased husband, Ángel is learning while he investigates the blackmail case. Like a chicha calm in black Spain, the vital space of history seems to threaten a storm.
And when the environment becomes violent, as the title announces: if you have to kill, kill yourself, as has always been done when neighborhood conflicts over borders and others fester too much.
Black society
Beheading is a more common demonstration than it seems to us. The cutting of the head has been one more modality of the Colombian tie type.
The rugged procedure usually results in a reckoning with a point between the macabre and the tribal. If you don't pay the mafia, you can lose your mind… From the most sinister cases of our reality to this novel in which a woman appears beheaded on Calle Güell in Barcelona.
The truth of the case of this novel is hidden between Latin mafias, robberies and those typical pending accounts that, instead of fixing default interest, establish the summary justice of a life as all payment on account ...
Just violence
When is it fair to resort to violence to defend something of yours? What is it that imperatively requires imminent execution? We all have something to defend at any cost.
Alexis Rodón had it too. Unless that excessive violence, outside of any intention of institutionalized justice, is a great cover to hide other types of less morally legitimate justifications.
In this crime novel, extremely topical cards are shuffled, such as police authority and its ability to execute before reaching the courts, or gender violence, or the ability of the underworld to pull strings to the highest levels. Probably the novel that most realistically looks at the noir genre as a mirror of what moves in the underworld.
