Despite being a psychology graduateToni Hill has been a translator and author of intrigue novels since 2011.With the release of the first part of The Summer of Dead Toys trilogy, which tells the story of Inspector Héctor Salgado. His latest work, The Last Hangman, is a thriller set in post-pandemic Barcelona and features a very special serial killer in the lead role; On “Interview with Toni Hill” on Tuesday, September 5th at 7:00 pm, there is definitely a serial killer who has a lot to talk about. 19:30, just after the opening of Cartagena Negra and before the delivery of the V Novel Prize “Icue Negro”.
The Last Executioner is a gray-eyed thriller where the bad guys aren’t all that bad and the good guys aren’t all that good. Is this a way of embodying the difficulty of finding the ‘reciprocity’ that the Law of Retaliation seeks?
The characters in my novels are generally never bad or good, but some have a higher proportion of evil or goodness than others. I don’t believe that 99% of people are actually bad or good. We are all a mixture of many things, and depending on the moment and the situation, one side or the other weighs more on us. The Last Executioner has an openly psychopathic character and acts completely reprehensible, but when I think about the novel, at some point the reader feels a little compelled to empathize with this man despite knowing that he is not a nice person. . On the other hand, the good guys chasing him aren’t saints either. That’s what was interesting to me about this whole game, asking ourselves where the borders are, what is justice, what is revenge… Rather than answering, I wanted to ask a series of questions along with the novel.
In the case of the overtly cruel protagonist, was it morally difficult for him to create a character that he could love with hatred at the same time?
That’s what I like, of course it’s hard and everything has to be believable, so you have to treat the guy’s personality with a lot of respect and qualify everything that can be described, so you have to create a character that has little empathy for the rest of the world, the rest of the world, we psychopaths. We are not, we can empathize with him, right? A certain nuance cannot be loose. But Thomas is a very complex, very contradictory character, and therein lies the difficulty of the novel.
Like The Executioner Nicomedes Méndez, is there a direct or indirect inspiration for the emergence of this novel?
Nicomedes helped me a lot because I found him at the right time while thinking about how to define my psychopath. It’s one of the finds you found, partly by chance, partly because you seem to be looking for something. He was too lucky to think it was just a coincidence. But it really worked and gave me the full costume the character was wearing. Nicomedes, on the other hand, was a very curious and private man, not a psychopath, getting paid to execute people. As many royal executioners said, in a time when the death penalty was legal, if it was a job someone had to do it, the garrot would not do it alone. Inspiration comes from here; someone has to do this job.
And in your creative process, do you draw more inspiration from reality or fiction and fantasy?
The truth is there, it surrounds us and we can touch it, but I work hard with my imagination. One of the things I love most is thinking about the plot of a novel, and I don’t like being inspired by real cases because there are real people suffering. I can make my characters suffer in my novels, but they don’t stop being characters. I don’t have to bind myself to the conventions of reality; You can take fiction wherever you want, reality cannot.
After 12 years in the black literary world, have you noticed changes in public interest, perhaps with the rise of events like the Cartagena Negra?
I don’t know whether events arouse interest or interest creates events. I believe that many Spanish crime novel writers have succeeded in making the audience prefer our novels to those coming from abroad. For many years good thrillers were in English and a bit in French, and they said that Spanish novels are like movies, much worse, and that what you have to do is consume American, English, black literature, then Northern literature… and now I think we’ve accomplished something very difficult, and that is to create a readership and activity that feeds each other. When I started 12 years ago, we were like pioneers in this regard. Lorenzo Silva, Manuel Martín and a few others were there but that’s it. Then a wave of writers emerged in different styles: a more agile thriller or a novel with a more social and deeper content… It’s good that events, novels, writers and audiences are multiplying at this time because everything goes together.