Rosa Montero visits the island as a guest for the Tenerife Noir Festival, bringing a new book in hand that readers have already labeled as an experiment: La desconocida. The work marks her return to the crime fiction genre.
In truth, it is the first book she has written truly within the genre because she does not believe in genres. By the end of the twenty-first century, she sees labels as locking someone into a mold and limiting. There are many more hybrid forms now. She, for example, has a trilogy with Bruna Husky, a detective who also exists a century ahead. It blends science fiction, crime fiction, and existential fiction into a single novel.
You may worry that she does not trust genres, but perhaps crime fiction is the most transgressive of them all.
What she means is that the tools of crime storytelling show up in mainstream novels, so to speak. They fill nearly every page of her work. Those resources allow her to craft a modern urban epic, a contemporary social panorama. This is why Spain showed such a long fondness for crime fiction even before it became a global trend. It resonates with the tradition of the picaresque, a literary lineage that speaks from palaces to brothels and exposes society in all its corners. That versatility suits almost any narrative. And then there is intrigue and suspense, elements she uses because life, to her, is defined by uncertainty and mystery. Believing you can choreograph the future is fiction in itself.
Behind La desconocida, with its 150 pages, lies a curious process. A French festival invites the country’s guest author to collaborate with a writer from France on a four-handed novel.
They chose Olivier Truc, a writer she already knew from years past when they published with the same French publisher. They got drawn in by the challenge. Normally, she spends a year to a year and a half preparing a book and had never considered writing with someone else. The idea of a two-author novel held a certain risk, especially since the project demanded a three-month turnaround. They planned eight chapters, alternating between the two writers. The instruction was to craft a sort of exquisite corpse, a surreal game. Yet writing a crime novel this way struck them as nonsensical; crime fiction is, in essence, a finely tuned machine. From the start they agreed to develop the story together. They aimed to surprise one another while following a shared framework. The flood of emails between them reached roughly twice the length of the book itself, and they wrote most of them in English. It was a curious experience, and Montero is proud to have completed it on time, despite other commitments. Equally satisfying is that the result holds together; its meaning is clear. The project has already attracted a Netflix option to shoot a film, and they plan to do another collaboration—this time with more breathing room.
In the novel, a detective is set in Barcelona, facing the case, while a French police inspector with a dubious reputation appears as a counterbalance. Did each author create one of these characters?
Yes. The setup was that one writer would handle the even chapters and the other the odd. Montero wrote the opening while her collaborator crafted the ending. She created La desconocida, a woman found bound and unconscious in a Barcelona port container, who has lost her memory. Then the detective took shape on her own, and the inspector character was his. When it came to writing her chapters, she had to follow and develop the other author’s characters, and vice versa. It was the most fun to watch characters start taking on a life of their own, sometimes behaving in ways neither author had anticipated. They believe they pulled it off—faithful to the other’s contributions while building forward. The whole book became a journey into the other, and then another layer deeper.
During her stay on the island, she also participated in a talk at the university on memory, literature, and journalism.
She believes journalism in written form is literature. The distinction, if any, lies between journalism and fiction. Being a writer who can report and craft prose is a noble art in itself. A classic example like In Cold Blood by Truman Capote is both a reportage and a literary achievement. The aim is to write compelling literature through journalism; many writers practice more than one genre. She cites Octavio Paz as a figure who spans essay and poetry, and mentions how many authors have also worked as journalists. She began as a storyteller in childhood, turning imagination into narratives and experimenting with language. The habit of writing never left her; it was both a game and a craft that grew with time.
Earlier this week, she published a new book that touches on what she was discussing.
Yes, it relates to journalism that dares to claim a literary space. It is titled Cuentos verdaderos, a collection of chronicles she wrote and published in El País between 1978 and 1988. She calls them cuentos because they are deeply narrativized—some read like chapters from a novel, but they are, indeed, true.
In revisiting these chronicles, did she find any surprises in what she recounts?
She was astonished. These pieces span from 45 to 35 years ago and feel like another country, a different world. Some moments had faded from memory. One chronicle, for instance, recounts Miguel Ríos’s 1982 Bienvenidos tour, and the days spent with him writing Diario de una grupi. It is striking how rough Spain felt at the time and how ruthless some managers could be when the money for an act was involved. In a stadium filled with 30,000 people, they waited for the manager to appear with the payment. The recollections reveal a landscape that is both intimate and revealing, a vivid snapshot of a chapter in cultural history that has mostly faded from memory.