Miguel Fortea. Burgos, 1965 Writer and editor. His crime novel Of debts and dead, starring detective Dalmau and set at the end of the Spanish civil war, marks the birth of a new publishing house: Sentry.
- ‘De debts y muertos’ is a crime novel set in the followingmath of the civil war. Why did you choose that specific period?
- I was looking for a historical period in Spain that might resemble a bit the Chicago of the 1920s. And it seemed to me that the civil war was quite a fit for that: it was a scene of a certain misrule, of many armed gangs that were difficult to control, of gunmen and where the State, a bit like Chicago in the 1920s, was not able to maintain sufficient order. I think that the civil war is a very strong and very powerful setting for a crime novel like “De debts y muertos”, which does not attempt to explain the civil war at all.
- His novel begins in the throes of the civil war, when Franco is on the outskirts of Madrid waiting for the different factions of the republican army, embarking on their own miniature civil war absurdity, to settle accounts among themselves …
- So it is. Franco at that moment is limited to waiting for them to kill each other. In the end, there was indeed a small-scale civil war grotesque, a Valle Inclin-style grotesque; tragedies are repeated like farces. The rebellious Army did not really take Madrid: it simply waited for anarchists and socialists to confront communists, as they did. The Francoist army did not take Madrid, it limited itself to entering Madrid, because there was hardly any resistance left. The last bullets of the Republicans were fired at each other, between the different sides of the Republic.
- In that last scuffle between the different republican factions is where a friend of detective Dalmau is assassinated and he decides to investigate his death, right?
- S. The dead man is a friend of Inspector Dalmau, who at that time, due to the vicissitudes of war, is a republican captain. Dalmau is convinced that this was murder. Although everyone tells him that this death is part of the job, Dalmau is convinced that it is murder, because his friend has had a bullet in the neck. At the time of the assassination the communists are attacking the anarcho-socialists, who are in the Interior Ministry, and it seems that Dalmau’s friend had some important information regarding the end of the war and that someone has killed him to get rid of them. l. Dalmau wants to investigate that death but his bosses won’t let him. And two days later Madrid falls and Dalmau is imprisoned. First by the communists, for refusing to attack the other side, and later imprisoned by the rebel army.
- Dalmau is sent first to a prison and then to build the Valley of the Fallen, right?
- S. He goes to jail and there he is ‘selected’ to go to Wall Hanger, because going there was like a ‘prize’. Cuelgamuros was a special prison where punishment is redeemed: for each day in Cualgamuros they took three days of prison from you, it was considered a ‘privilege’ to go and build the Cross of the Fallen. And indeed, compared to the other prisons there were, being in Wall Hanger was a privilege.
- His book also recounts the wild black market that was in Cuelgamuros. Was it as brutal as you describe it?
- Yes, there was enormous corruption in the army and the country in general, something that we have continued to perceive even many years following we have served in the military. There is a tendency to do with military budgets all kinds of small businessmen who are prospering under the heat of any contract. A lot of material entered through Cuelgamuros. That material would take a walk through the Madrid mountains, enter Cuelgamuros, then leave there once more and end up being sold on the black market. In between, there was someone who if he had to build with not know how many materials or feed the prisoners with X food, he would do it with less. And he sold the rest to the markets, which were totally out of supply. Thus arose a new “rapiero” businessman linked to the long tradition of the Spanish picaresque.
- When Dalmau is released from prison, he is an outlaw person, because he has served on the Republican side. In order to ‘rehabilitate’ himself in the face of the Franco regime, he decided to join the Blue Division as a volunteer. I thought that the Blue Division was made up of ardent Francoists. Wasn’t it?
- Initially, in the Blue Division there were many idealists or fanatics, whatever you want, basically Falangists, because Franco was a concept that does not yet exist, which gradually amalgamated with time and to the extent of Franco. For the Falangists their model and ideal was Hitler, so at first many went to the Blue Division happy. But that was only the first contingents, followingwards they were less and less happy, for various reasons.
- What reasons?
- First because they froze in Russia and secondly, because many of those Falangists were disenchanted, they realized that Hitler’s model was not theirs. The Falangists did not have that brutal anti-Semitism and racism in general (which actually included the Spanish as an inferior race) that the Nazis had, and they quickly realized that Hitler was exterminating the Jews and that this was not the model to follow. . Many of those Falangists from the first contingents returned disenchanted, fewer and fewer would join the Blue Division. Franco, in order to meet Hitler, encouraged people to join the Blue Division. And she was joined by many poor people and also quite a few Republicans. Because it is one thing that a republican had been released from prison and another that he might be one more. For the Republicans, everything was more complicated, starting with access to work, they were retaliated once morest.
- The fact that a republican signed up then to the Blue Division, redeems him in the face of the Franco regime?
- That’s it. The idea of enlisting Dalmau in the novel in the Blue Division was given to me by some reading regarding Jos Luis Garca Berlanga, the great filmmaker. His family was Republican, he was retaliated and to prevent it from continuing, Berlanga was in the Blue Division, rehabilitating himself in the face of the victors of the civil war. And, in fact, Berlanga appears in a small scene in “De debts y muertos”. The fact that there were Republicans in the Blue Division is not only plausible, but it is possible that it was even mildly common.
- Is Dalmau, the protagonist of his novel, able to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the Franco regime following passing through the Blue Division?
- Dalmau is a vocational loser, so he never fully rehabbs. But following returning from the Blue Division, he does manage to obtain a detective license, something that was previously unthinkable for a former Republican captain but is now possible because he is a former veteran of the Blue Division. Thanks to that, he can enter the world of work, although he continues to arouse reluctance, and in the normal world without being a plague.
- In “Debts and Dead” he also tells that among the Francoists who were in Madrid the hoax ran that the Siam embassy, through a system of tunnels and sewers, reached the national zone. But those who awaited them at the end of the tunnel were anarchists who shot them. Was that real?
- Yes, it is real. Siam is actually a movie country, it doesn’t exist. But people went there desperate, many people entered that false embassy without knowing that where they were actually going was the slaughterhouse.
- What do you think regarding Franco being unearthed from the Valley of the Fallen?
- Seem right. And I also think it’s good that it becomes a memorial regarding the civil war. What would seem an aberration to me would be to be thrown away. Of course, the Valley of the Fallen cannot be the symbol of the victors. It is a monument -very reviled, although it is not so bad-, all the sculpture that it has is remarkable -work of Juan de Valos, a republican- and how everything of enormous dimensions leaves its mark.
- What is it that fascinates us so much regarding the crime novel? Why do we like it so much?
- I like the classic. What I like is that you can describe the same as in any novel, but having an itinerary, an objective, makes the story of the lonely hero who fights once morest everyone, which is the classic model of a crime novel, easier. There has to be something to investigate so that this lonely hero can get into all the places and in all the ‘scrubs’ in which he gets himself, there has to be a motor. But research is not so important to me, but what it does, what it sees and what it experiences. And on the other hand, violence is something that fascinates us. The most current crime novel, which sometimes reaches sadism, interests me much less, blood and casquera interest me less. And the same thing happens with cinema: I like classic cinema better, that people die in black and white, instead of being gutted a guy for a quarter of an hour.
- It said at the beginning that the civil war is a perfect period to set a crime novel, and yet there are very few. Why
- There are some, but more set in the postwar period. And I don’t know why. There are essays that study the civil war or that try to justify one side or the other, but not to novel it. The same thing happens with the films, there are few, almost all from the postwar period or from the rear. And I don’t understand it, the Civil War is a historical milestone, as the Civil War is for the Americans, of which there are a lot of movies. It seems to me the perfect period for a crime novel, the most suitable. Also, and since I like the classic crime novel, setting it in that moment also allows me to write in a somewhat remote, more classic way. On the other hand, I do not know anything regarding police investigation, much less scientific investigation, and also I am not interested in setting the novel at the end of the civil war allows me to ignore all that, because before the investigations were much cleaner, more Simple, an area with seven mobiles was not triangulated to locate a person.
- You have worked all your life in a bank and now you have wrapped the blanket around your head to set up a publishing house, Avizor (https://avizorediciones.com), whose first book is precisely “De debtas y muertos”. Doesn’t it give you vertigo?
- Yes, it is nonsense. But sooner or later you have to do the things you like. And in my case it was the moment. You cannot leave everything indefinitely for later because later is not insured. Everything fitted more or less well for me and I decided to take the step, because I thought that if I don’t dare now I will never dare.
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