Imagination at the service of crime. I am not trying to describe an ingenious murderer but rather the writer capable of making the criminal that suggestive argument, between the morbid and the disturbing. And that is where imagination takes on its special relevance, along with the craft of the author in question. In this eclectic performance between virtues, desires and skill, Don César Pérez Gellida is setting a standard in current noir.
Hence, an award as renowned as the Nadal Novel Prize 2024 has fallen on his pen with the weight of new relevance. From now on, Pérez Gellida has a bibliography that will no longer be a matter for fans of the genre, but will be extended to all types of readers attracted by César's ingenuity and know-how.
Because just as it happened with Fred Vargas and her Prince of Asturias award (being an essentially noir narrator), the recognition means that there is a lot of virtue beyond dedication to one type or another of narrative.
It is also about recognizing that in today's prolific genres such as noir, suspense or mystery, only authors with a great imagination are capable of offering a clearly identifiable work, with an unmistakable seal and imprint.
Cesar Perez Gellida He has that vitola, the author's mark perfectly crafted and recognizable already from the titles of his novels. In Spain there are many prominent crime novel authors. The thing is to differentiate yourself today, to make yourself recognizable from the first pages. Something that does well Javier Castillo with its always very raw starts…
What will start Vazquez Montalban o Gonzalez Ledesma became the work of new writers such as Dolores Redondo and its narrative tension, Victor of the Tree with its depth in the characters... Until reaching profiles like that of Pérez Gellida and his masterful mastery of creativity towards the scenarios and the most unexpected turns that make his narrative a work that is always recommended to surprise.
When we quote your trilogies: «Verses, songs and bits of meat» o Sayings, songs and traces of blood» the simple name of the work transcends to that current space of the noir genre, in which it plays with suspicious appearances, with sinister metaphors and criminal hyperboles, with the everyday or the exceptional of future scenarios, with the deforming mirrors of the ill-born from dehumanization or the weight of circumstances that disturb the souls of its characters.
Top 3 recommended novels by César Pérez Gellida
Memento died
Sometimes an author's first novel is that great work that has been marinating at the free pace of the writer who begins to discover himself. And on many of those occasions that freedom, that time given to the work for the pleasure of writing, ends up transmitting a powerful and unforgettable story. A great takeoff for a trilogy verses, songs and pieces of meat of which we will also become more aware in its film version. Because Amazon Prime turns all this imagery made in Gellida into a series for everyone.
From Memento Mori they arrived Dies Irae y consummatum is. Famous quotes in Latin to assume the naturalness of a dead language about the rigor, frigor and livor mortis of so many victims that await us...
A novel focused on the author's own city, Valladolid. Everything happens in a current time, when a macabre murder takes place dramatized with the ostentation of death, with the undeniable recreation of psychopathy conceived by the mind that suffers from it as an ode to the art of killing. Worrying for me is this guy's taste for a great album like "The Time of Cherries" by Bunbury and Vegas, with its overwhelming directness..., of course capable of upsetting our despicable murderer with its lyrics...
Because he is a narcissistic guy who, somehow, considers himself far above people. He is a refined, cultured guy, and as the world advances in his irrepressible drift, he considers that he must take action to manifest his gift for art and the dissemination of his megalomaniacal ideas. Thus began the first trilogy of an author who never ceased to surprise us...
We grow dwarfs
It could be considered that the greater the noise, the more possibilities of executing the perfect crime. Because in meticulousness, neat and exquisite criminals always end up coinciding with investigators at the opposite pole loaded with sophisticated analysis systems. So why go with the minutiae. Put to kill that splashes the blood with its dark flow of black Spain. There where ancestral hatreds are cultivated, or disputes of spontaneous generation, towards harvests of the most sinister and unsuspected.
A sadistic and intelligent assassin with a single goal: never to be caught. Two bodies have appeared in a pine forest in Valladolid. According to the autopsy, one of them is the main suspect in crimes that occurred in the municipality of Urueña several years ago. This script twist puts Bittor Balenziaga and Sara Robles, the police officers and civil guards in charge of that case, on alert, especially when other corpses begin to appear in different parts of the national geography. And all with disfigured faces after practicing the Glasgow smile.
César Pérez Gellida masterfully constructs a chilling plot full of twists and turns and memorable characters. Dwarfs Grow Us is a brutal and sharp novel that transcends the limits of the police and offers us a disturbing fresco of human relations.
Splinters on the skin
Without a doubt, the past can be like that splinter on the skin that is barely noticeable at times but triggering pain when rubbing. You try to remove it but you cannot, and you bleed ... You leave it as impossible but you have already urged that strange element into the space, that splinter occupied in procuring pain from its hiding place in your dermis ...
Two childhood friends with an outstanding debt. A forced reunion in the walled town of Urueña in Valladolid. Álvaro, a successful writer, and Mateo, a crucigramist in the red, will end up trapped in the chaotic medieval layout of the town and under an unrepentant rumble. Both will be part of a macabre game in which the thirst for revenge will lead them to make decisions that will condition their lives in the event that one of them manages to make it through the day.
Splinters in the leather it is an absorbent thriller psychological in which it is confirmed that César Pérez Gellida is the true magician of the deception of our lyrics. A novel with an addictive and suffocating plot in the purest cinematographic style and at the service of quality literature.
Other recommended books by César Pérez Gellida…
khimera
A novel to rediscover Pérez Gellida and understand his current great impact on the noir genre. Because moving with the ease that César does in such disparate genres is illuminating for his creative capacity.
2054. After the War of Global Devastation, the social and geopolitical reality has changed dramatically. The old concepts of democracy and capitalism have been buried by transhumanist currents and technophagy. Power is concentrated in the hands of large corporations, however, there is still a loose end, an annoying problem that escapes the sharp nails of the Assembly: Khimera.
In the risky search for an enigmatic character known as the bogatyr - hero for some and villain for others - are placed the last hopes of those who fight to make the world change forever.
César Pérez Gellida, author of the trilogy "Verses, songs and pieces of meat", an absolute critical and sales success in the last year, returns to the narrative, surpassing all our expectations and breaking his own canons with a story that stylistically recalls the creative skill of JRR Tolkien and the visionary mastery of George Orwell or William Blake. A reinvention of the literary thriller in the purest Gellida style that some have already described as a masterpiece.
All the worst
En Cesar Perez Gellida everything acquires that cinematographic point, that frenetic action that turns its thrillers in unstoppable gusty waves of reading tension. So each new plot ends up being devoured by readers with the same dizzying pace of its narrative proposals.
Even more so in this obvious sequel to "All the best", with its gloomy setting in the middle of a cold war in which the abominable always has a place in underworlds such as espionage.
Our reunion with Viktor Lavrov immediately resumed new vigor, as soon as some chain murders end up adding an important agent of the euphemistic Democratic Germany who, in the decades before the fall of the wall, followed his designs in tune with the socialism of the East .
At first the criminal only seemed to be a homophobe who killed homosexuals with macabre relish. Until the deaths begin to point to mere excuses to cover up some other more political end ...
Under those ambivalent conditions that the scene of a cold war in its last throes facilitates, Viktor moves once again between the criminal and the political.
And every step he takes in an investigation shared with Otto Bauer, the heir hound of the Nazi Kripo, will point to that imminent danger that threatens to overwhelm the researchers' part of life at risk or the geopolitical aspect of the imminent royal war. buried in the icy settings of those days.
The determination of the sexuality of the victims also serves the author to locate us in a not so distant past in which the strict moral imported from the religious to the bowels of the political, spread like a cancer throughout all social space, like a stranger inquisition of the twentieth century.
Nothing better for a psychopath than a unique moral scenario. Where he can cling to redirect what in his opinion deviates from the proper order. The murderer's animosity towards his victims on the one hand and the ultimate end of his chain of crimes on the other. Viktor and Otto face the difficult mission of putting it all together to end up tracing that winding path into the mind of the criminal. A labyrinth in which, even finding the exit and stopping the insane, anyone can end up losing their reason, or worse their life.
All the best
Do you remember the cold war? Undoubtedly a historical period of brilliant metaphor to define a state of frozen conflict, just waiting to gain temperature to end up exploding over the whole world.
The space race, the arms race, espionage. Strange times those, with a peak of intensity between 50 and 60 that threatened civilization because everything pointed to the final confrontation. And that is where Pérez Gellida takes us in this novel, with an undeniable punch to the John le Carré.
We delve into the personality of Viktor Lavrov, a KGB agent, of that terrible bad side that they sold us from the United States. The young agent receives a mission of substance in which he must show his skills to pull the thread in any crime that points to espionage or secret investigations.
In his assignment, Viktor will have to interact with the East German criminal police. And that is how he will find out about a heinous case of chain murders in which the victims are innocent girls. It is in those moments when the human ends up flourishing above any professionalism. And this is how Viktor will end up getting involved in the resolution of the girls' sinister case, whose repercussions will be much greater than he could ever have imagined...
Konets
Sometimes a sequel ends up addressing aspects that, for those who have been fascinated with the work as a whole, (in this case the union between the author's two trilogies), complement in a fascinating way gears that end up motivating everything. Olek is again the protagonist of this installment. Around his particular circumstances, a back and forth story is outlined between the motives for evil and the consequences of knowing him.
The author has created a kind of synthesis in this new work that for the moment closes a vast universe that has provided for two trilogies, the sequel Khimera and the book that concerns us here. The current crime novel tends at times to the frivolization of evil , to the capacity of perversion of the human being, to the liberation of all moral filters.
Faced with such a scenario, a space is opened for the reader for ethical involvement in a border where what is correct and what is ominous seem like a strange scale alternately defeated on one side or the other. Circumstances rule. What Olek was determines what he can become. What Olek does not know about his past may be a legacy marked in his genes. Knowledge can be a new source towards self-confirmation.
In the previous novel Khimera, we discover the young Olek, but we do not know why his nature had a derivation towards that evil coined in his soul. This time we discover the whole perspective. Adolescence is the ideal age to manifest the fit of the personality in the world.
A momentous moment, halfway between learning and impulses ... And over the years, when sometimes you do not finish recognizing the human project that you were, you can look for justifications or continue letting that seed grow, in any of the ramifications to which it leads you.
