Jeffrey Oxford.Midwestern State University
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Spain’s “Country Noir” Genre: Dolores Redondo’s
Baztán Triology
“Country noir,” at times also called “rural noir,” is a relatively recent neologism applied to a particular variant of detective fiction genre and an even more recent narratological technique of Hispanic letters. Many critics credit the American novelist Daniel Woodrell for first using the “country noir” term as a subtitle for his 1996 novel Give Us a Kiss; however, the basic characteristics of such narratives in non-Hispanic literature go back much further. Jake Hinkson, for example, posits that “we find the beginning of rural noir’s most resonant theme: the burden of kinship” (35) in the 1948 film Moonrise. Gary Deane argues that “One of the earliest and still-best examples of rural noir was James Ross’ They Don’t Dance Much, published in 1940.” And the author(s) of the MysteryPeople blogsite state(s) that “The roots of rural noir come from the Southern Gothic authors” such as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Jake Hinkson, and Jim Thompson. Notably, almost all critics attribute the birth of the genre to United States provenance, with many specifically noting the importance of the historically rural Deep South to its genesis given that area’s “well known […] reputation for intolerance and staunch social conservatism as well as [its] being a deep pocket of religious fundamentalism” (MyBookishWays).
In fact, if such a characterization of the Deep South is to be believed, perhaps that is why that geographical region of the U.S. has proven to be a fertile breeding ground for the country noir, a “genre […] where the periphery serve[s] as backdrop for all kinds of misery” (Valstrom 40). But more than just the periphery, and more than just a backdrop, the Hispanic version of the country noir is “apresentando uma dimensão antipastoral” (Duarte 20, fn5). The countryside, then, is no longer the restful, beautiful, and peaceful escape from the evils of urban life. It is not just that the countryside has lost its pleasantness and is now an amoral environ; it has transformed into an anti-pastoral site where immorality abounds. The pastoral beatus ille, in sum, has devolved into an arena of evil as pernicious as the urban environ. As Terry Gifford notes, anti-pastoral literature—of which country/rural noir is one example—can be summed up as “Unidealised – harsh, unattractive; […] Problematic – [it] shows tensions, disorder, inequalities; [… and it] Demythologies Arcadia, Eden, Shangri-La” (19). It is my argument that to believe that country noir is merely a typical noir, or hard-boiled, novel set in a rural environment is a bit naïve and cognizant of only one aspect of the subgenre, the setting, while, in fact, there are several distinct characteristics that set country noir apart from more traditional noir. I would even go so far as to suggest that the inclusion of the word “noir” in the nomenclature, as will be seen in the following analysis of Redondo’s Baztán’s trilogy--El guardián invisible (2013), Legado en los huesos (2013), and Ofrenda a la tormenta (2014)—, [1] is somewhat of a misnomer as these novels are closer to the police procedural than they are to traditional noir, or hard-boiled fiction.
Jake Hinkson expounds on “rural noir’s most resonant theme: the burden of kinship,” by explaining that “rural noir locates its stories in the tangled, and sometimes downright twisted, dynamics of family” (35) where “Past and present collide in a way that invokes the famous adage of William Faulkner […] that ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’” (35). Such certainly is a central feature of the Baztán trilogy. The main character, Amaia Salazar, begins the series as a regional police member (policía floral) in Pamplona, Spain, rising to the rank of Head of the Homicide Division by the second novel. She is originally from Elizondo, a small town of some 3,500 people in the Batzán Valley, some 55 kilometers to the north, northeast of Pamplona and only a short distance from the French border. It becomes quite apparent over the course of the trilogy that with the exception of her husband James, a U.S. expatriate and artist, and her aunt Engrasi, Amaia’s family is of questionable, if not obviously criminal, moral character. Perhaps the most disturbing of all is Amaia’s mother Rosario whose past abusive behavior still haunts Amaia in recurring nightmares that result in Amaia suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and unconsciously pointing her weapon at her husband, her sister Ros, and even herself at different points in the works. In El guardián invisible Rosario never actually physically appears on the scene since she is institutionalized due to a severe mental illness, but the reader does learn how some twenty years prior she had attacked the nine-year old Amaia and left her for dead, initially refusing to listen to her husband’s insistence that she go for the doctor. In Legado en los huesos, Rosario violently assaults her nurse and escapes from the aforementioned hospital, immediately going to Engrasi’s house in order to steal away Amaia’s young child and sacrifice him to the mythological god Inguma. Amaia finally arrives on the scene when the knife is already threatening the child and convinces her mother that the child is a boy, and not a girl, at which point Rosario drops the child and leaves the altar site in the cave, disappearing into the stormy night. And in Ofrenda a la tormenta, Rosario unexpectedly appears once again at the hospital where she commits suicide by slashing her own throat while staring at the security camera. All the while, Amaia suffers nightmares and visions of her mother’s verbal and physical threats and unexpectedly uncovers evidence that Rosario had, in fact, intentionally suffocated Amaia’s twin at birth and unsuccessfully attempted the same on Amaia at the same time. Even the Vatican representative, priest Sarasola, who is in town because of the profaning of a church, calls Amaia’s mother “evil” (Legado 271), plainly stating to Amaia that “su madre no está poseída. Es malvada, su alma es tan oscura como la noche” (274).
Amaia’s oldest sister Flora also has a conflictive personality, continually at odds with their middle sister Ros and frequently verbally assaulting Amaia as well, accusing her of having made up the entire story concerning their mother’s attempts on Amaia’s life. Flora verbally incites the killer of the young girls in Guardián, refuses to either reconcile with her estranged husband Víctor or divorce him, admits to Amaia that she is sleeping with the policeman Montes for the sole purpose of obtaining information related to the investigation concerning the killing of the girls, begins ordering flour for the family bakery from another provider in order to steer the police investigation in a different direction, and finally murders the assassin whom she has been inciting when that person, at Rosario’s insistence, kills Flora’s child. In Legado, the reader learns that Flora is the one who had told Rosario that Amaia was going to have a baby girl, even though Flora herself is well aware of the dangers of communicating such. In Ofrenda, Flora’s actions have been such that her sister Ros easily blackmails her into surrendering to Ros her share of the bakery. Ros obviously has little sympathy for Flora, stating, “no quiero pasarme el resto de mi vida bajo el yugo de mi hermana mayor” (Guardián 57), and Amaia thinks Flora is “la reina despótica a la que nada se le escapaba” (416). In fact, Amaia attempts to console Flora’s estranged husband Víctor by telling him that “[Flora] es una cabrona […] Y una hija de puta. […] Una bruja manipuladora y sin corazón” (Guardián 378). When trying to convince her colleague Montes that Flora doesn’t really love him, that she is only using him for her own personal gain, Amaia tells him, “Es mala, Fermín. Flora es mala, le destruirá, acabará con usted, es un puto demonio” (Ofrenda 160). In fact, even the normally calm Engrasi agrees with Amaia that Flora’s initial attempt to buy out Ros’s share of the bakery “no suponía más que un pulso para Flora, una ocasión más para demostrar su fuerza y su dominio” (Ofrenda 400). And if all that is not enough, later in Ofrenda it becomes even more readily apparent that Flora’s moral character is severely compromised when Ros finds Flora’s diary, and Amaia questions Flora about their childhood. In fact, the reader may justifiably wonder if a sequel to the trilogy may be forthcoming in which Flora assumes leadership of the satanic cult inciting the child sacrifices.[2]
While one might sympathize deeply with Amaia because of the obvious trauma and family issues she has been forced to confront her entire life, even she is not exempt from nefarious activities harmful to her own family life. In fact, in Ofrenda her son is only a few months old when she voluntarily cohabitates with the founding cult leader’s son while her husband has gone to the U.S. to be with his father during the elder man’s heart surgery. Even after Amaia finds incriminating evidence proving her lover’s father to be the former cult leader who encouraged the baby sacrifices, her paramour’s interference with the investigation’s advancement, and his murder of Amaia’s assistant, she continues the affair, finding herself inexplicably unable to resist his sexual charms. This, in effect, is yet another example of the past never leaving as overpowering charisma and erotic irresistibleness are the exact traits which had been attributed by others to the cult’s founding leader some twenty years prior.
A second characteristic of “country noir” novels that distinguishes it from traditional noir stories is that the latter have settings generally entirely devoid of the rural while the former, as Schlotterbeck argues, “feature both rural and urban settings […] with the lead character mov[ing] between these two locations by driving […] and nearly all rural noirs are also road movies.” Amaia Salazar, the lead detective, is a policía floral based in Pamplona, but at the onset of the first novel she is assigned the task of leading the investigation into the death of the young girl Ainhoa Eliazsu since she hails from Elizondo, a small village some 50 km from Pamplona and the closest locality to where Ainhoa’s body is found. It is soon discovered that Ainhoa’s death is only the latest in a twenty-year long string of murders of young girls throughout the Batzán Valley, with three others occurring in the first novel alone, and repercussions from those murders leading to other investigations throughout the series. In all three works Amaia spends a considerable amount of time at her aunt Engrasi’s house in Elizondo, but she does occasionally drive back to report to her superiors in Pamplona and increasingly travels throughout the Baztán Valley in her car investigating the various crimes. In El guardián invisible her travels are mainly limited to between Pamplona and Elizondo and around the immediate Elizondo area, with thirteen different trips being recorded. In addition to Amaia’s travels to Pamplona to communicate with her boss and to be at her home, she travels to the Navarre capital from Elizondo to interview Ángel, who had discovered Freddy’s (Ros’s husband) attempted suicide (Guardián 169) and to be present at Johana’s autopsy (Guardián 238). The most distant trip that she takes in Guardián is to Ainsa, some 240 kilometers to the southeast, where the scientists Raúl González y Nadia Takchenko have a laboratory in which they analyze different DNA samples of flours and pastries found on the bodies of the murdered girls (Guardián 306). The only other trip outside of the Baztán Valley that Amaia makes in Guardián is to Irún, some 45 kilometers northwest, where she questions the retired national policeman Alfonso Álvarez de Toledo concerning other questionable deaths of girls in Navarre when he was Head of Homicides years prior (387). All other travels are either in or very close to Elizondo: to the Baztán forest where Amaia originally meets the Huesca scientists searching to see if the girls’ killings are related to bear attacks (86), to Lekaroz, some three kilometers to the northwest of Elizondo, to question Johana’s stepfather about the girl’s death (228), to the Hotel Baztán five kilometers west of town on three different occasions, and to Víctor’s family’s manor on the outskirts of Elizondo where the denouement of the novel occurs.
In Legado en los huesos Amaia travels to Pamplona several times to meet with her superiors, to be at her own home, to be at the trial of Jason Medina, to question Zuriñe Zabaleta about her sister’s death, and to question the priest Sarasola at the church’s hospital there. She also visits Azanza, thirty minutes west of Pamplona, to search for and recover the body of Lucía Aguirre, whom Quiralte has murdered. Once again she travels to the Huesca doctors’ lab in Ainsa for DNA analysis of saliva and hair follicles. She also travels to Entrambasaguas (240 kilometers to the west) to interview a murdered lady’s sister and to Zarautz, (82 kilometers to the northwest) to question her own sister Flora about the murdered girl Anne, Víctor’s relationship with Anne, and Flora’s relationship to her. Other, shorter trips take her around the Baztán Valley, back to the nearby forest, to the nearby village of Arizkun, some six kilometers to the northeast of Elizondo, to inspect the multiple cases of church vandalism and speak with the church officials, and to nearby Irurita (2.5 km to the southwest) and Giltxaurdi, an outlying section of Elizondo.
Ofrenda a la tormenta undoubtedly is the novel in which Amaia travels the most, some 1732 miles (per Google maps) plus multiple excursions around Elizondo, the Baztán Valley and one half-day drive in which she searches for the house where the cult’s activities were/are held. In short, she travels to Pamplona thirteen different times; twice to Etxebertzeko Borda (24 km to the northwest of Elizondo), Irurita (an outlying Elizondo area), Hondarribia (50 km to the northwest), and Ainhoa, France (25.5 km north); and once to Irun, Igantzi, and Madrid (450 km). These trips involve various interviews with suspects, witnesses or family members of dead children, to the Pamplona prison or hospital, to her assassinated colleague Jonan’s house, to a Madrid mental hospital, or to various cemetery’s for the disinterment of child graves. In this last novel, in fact, Amaia seems to be “on the road” more than she is in Elizondo, and the novel seems to exude a constant atmosphere of transit.
Gary Deane names two other characteristics common to rural noir novels, stating that such portray “a world which feels like it’s about to explode in violence and usually does, leaving kith and kin to settle scores and make things right amid a conspiracy of silence.” While there are multiple occurrences of such throughout the series, Ros’s fight with Flora is a prime example of this when the former gives the latter the ultimatum to hand over her share of the bakery, explains why such should occur, and then details the steps she has already taken to assure that Flora will do as she says:
Soy joven y estoy sana, y no espero morir próximamente, pero aun así dispuse, entre otras cosas, que si algo me sucedía, si muero sea como sea, este sobre le sea entregado a nuestra hermana Amaia. Y hay algo que tengo claro, Flora: tu moral y la mía pueden dejar mucho que desear, pero si Amaia llega a conocer el contenido de ese diario no le temblará la mano […] tú sabes, como yo, que ella no aprobaría esto que hago, ni tendría piedad de ti. (Ofrenda 449)
Amaia’s recurring nightmares, in the form of flashbacks throughout the novels, portend future attempts on her child Ibai’s and her own lives while describing past familial violence which even Amaia’s husband knows nothing about prior to wresting the information from Amaia and Engrasi. And the child sacrifices are a hidden secret of the Baztán Valley with former members of the cult extremely hesitant to speak out because, as the one former sect member currently under church and police protection states, “Esperarán [the cult leaders] lo que haga falta, pero cuando ellos vengan a por mí, nadie podrá protegerme” (Ofrenda 411).
Deane’s second stated characteristic of the genre is that “at their core, [rural noir stories] are as much about self and family identity and how people can lose their way and go wrong even while trying to do the right thing.” Obviously, the doctor present at Amaia and her twin’s birth has lost his way. The nurse, a member of the sect that sacrifices baby girls to Inguma, is simply evil, but she convinces Dr. Manuel Hidalgo, her brother, to conceal Rosario’s murderous actions by signing a death certificate stating that Amaia’s twin died of SIDS: “¿Y qué queréis? —preguntó ella, alzando la voz—. ¿Llamar a la policía? ¿Montar un escándalo que salga en los periódicos? ¿Encerrar a una mujer que es una buena madre y que está sufriendo porque tú, hermano mío, cometiste el error de no tratar los síntomas que viste? ¿Le dirás eso a la policía? ¿Qué podrías haber evitado esto con un tratamiento? Destrozarás a esta familia y tu carrera, ¿Lo has pensado?” (Legado 387). Nine years later, when Rosario attacks and almost kills Amaia, Dr. Hidalgo succumbs to his desire to maintain his friendship with Rosario’s husband and not report the incident: “Juan, sabes que somos amigos, sabes que te aprecio. Lo que voy a decirte es entre tú y yo, te lo digo como amigo, no como médico” (Guardián 225). He then proves to Juan that Rosario has attacked Amaia with the intent to kill, and that Amaia’s injuries simply can not be due to an unfortunate accident, but he still is reluctant to report such to the authorities and continues the conspiracy of silence by not doing what is right. “Ahora como amigo y como médico tengo que pedirte que saques a la niña de tu casa, porque corre un grave peligro. Si no lo haces me veré obligado a poner esa denuncia. Te ruego que me entiendas” (Guardián 226). Flora has “doubly” lost her way in that in her desire to maintain traditional ethos, she incites the assassin of the young girls in Guardián to cleanse the valley of sexual promiscuity, and, as Amaia realizes late in the trilogy, Flora simply cannot separate herself from the fact that Rosario is their mother and empathize with Amaia even though she knows the truth about their mother’s threats on Amaia.
Finally, and as stated at the beginning of this essay, the inclusion of the word “noir” in the nomenclature of the subgenre is, I argue, a misnomer. Undoubtedly these novels are detective fiction with significant parallels to other, conspicuous characteristics of the “country noir”, but the fact remains that the Baztán trilogy more closely parallels the police procedural than the hard-boiled variant. Amaia is, after all, a professional police officer who solves the mystery by employing normal police routines in collaboration with other police (Dove 2), and the novels seem to end with a variant of the stereotypical typing up of a triplicate carbon copy summary of the case, even if in parodic form. At the end of Guardián, for example, Flora, when questioned by the police about her murder of Víctor, summarizes the entire investigation, twisting facts related to certain events to make herself appear innocent. Legado climaxes with Amaia’s questioning of Dr. Berasategui and explaining to him how the investigation has led her to him as the principal culpable party; shortly thereafter the narrative closes with Amaia signing off on the packet of documents regarding the missing body parts and her burying the bones of her exhumed relatives in the family plot. And the final scenes of Ofrenda narrate Amaia’s summarizing key parts of the investigation to judge Markina, with subsequent phone calls of condolences and appreciation to individuals who had played important roles in the investigation and its resolution. Thus, essential elements of the police procedural are present in the Baztán trilogy.
In regards to fundamental aspects of the hard-boiled, Lewis Moore argues that violence both by and against the detectives “moves to the fore” (18), stating that such is a principal focus of the genre (17). Leroy Lad Panek posits a distinct language style as “one of the defining features of the hard-boiled story. […] Traditional hard-boiled language begins with non-standard diction—ungrammatical speech, slang, etc.” (8). And René Craig-Odders argues that “In the hard-boiled novel there is always a [femme fatale] around whom the case revolves in some respect” (112). In the Baztán trilogy there is only occasional violence against the detectives: Amaia’s assistant Jonan is murdered, and one of the Huesca scientists is forcibly driven off the road in an attempt by the criminals to impede the DNA analysis of evidence. Aside from that, however, the violence directed toward the detectives is the psychological turbulence—mainly background—that Amaia suffers from nightmares of her mother, and certainly no physical, potentially lethal, violence against Amaia ever actually “moves to the fore” of the narratives. In like manner, the traditional non-standard diction and the femme fatale of the hard-boiled are also missing from this trilogy. Given the synonymous nature of the terms “hard-boiled” and “noir,” then, it is quite apparent that none of the characteristics generally named by critics as fundamental to noir fiction are prominent features of the Baztán trilogy. In fact, these aspects are, for all intents and purposes, absent from Redondo’s works. That is, the Baztán trilogy is set in a rural area, based around a focus on the burden of kinship and the eterno retorno nature of crime and the past in the countryside, and each novel concludes with a summarizing synthesis of the investigation undertaken in that work. While “rural police procedural” or “country police procedural” may not yet be the most accepted nomenclature to describe this relatively new sub-genre of Hispanic fiction, either one is actually a more accurate description of the—perhaps paradoxical—dark and dreary night one can expect when opening the covers of the Hispanic writer Dolores Redondo.
[1]Hereafter referred to as, respectively, Guardián, Legado, and Ofrenda.
[2]Besides the narrative’s indication that Flora knows more about the cult and its activities than she is willing to admit to Amaia, it should be noted that in a 2015 interview with Héctor Porto, Redondo says “La trilogía ha terminado, pero Amaia regresará con nuevos casos. No será inmediatamente, tengo otra novela en la cabeza, ya muy madura. Y después volveré con Amaia.”
Works Cited
Bermejo, Andrea G. “‘El guardián invisible’ El bosque animado.” Cinemanía 258 (March 2014): 86-89.
Craig-Odders, Renée. The Detective Novel in Post-Franco Spain: Democracy, Disillusionment, and Beyond. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1999.
Deane, Gary. “Rural Noir: Taking Refuge.” NoirWorthWatching 11 September 2016. Accessed 4 June 2018. http://noirworthwatching.blogspot.com/2016/09/rural-noir-taking-refuge.html.
Duarte, José. “Um herói real na cidade: Drive (2011), de Nicolas Winding Refn. A Real Hero in the City: Drive (2011), by Nicolas Winding Refn.” Comunicação & Inovação, PPGCOM/US 17.35 (2016): 15-29. Accessed 4 June 2018. http://repositorio.ul.pt/bitstream/10451/27803/1/3729-13240-1-PB.pdf.
Gifford, Terry. “Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral and Post-Pastoral as Reading Strategies.” Accessed 4 June 2018. http://www.terrygifford.co.uk/Pastoral%20reading.pdf.
Hinkson, Jake. “Night and the Country: A History of Rural Noir.” Mystery Scene 133 (2014): 34-36.
Moore, Lewis D. Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920s to the Present. Jeffereson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
MyBookishWays. “Grit Lit: An Intro to Southern Noir.” CrimeFictionLover. 20 January 2013. Accessed 5 June 2018. https://crimefictionlover.com/2013/01/grit-lit-a-southern-noir-intro/.
MysteryPeople. “Down and Dirty in the Country: A Quick Look at Rural Noir.” 3 April 2015. Accessed 5 June 2018. https://mysterypeople.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/down-and-dirty-in-the-country-a-quick-look-at-rural-noir/.
Panek, LeRoy Lad. New Hard-Boiled Writers, 1970s-1990s. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000.
Porto, Héctor J. “Entrevista a Dolores Redondo: ‘La trilogía ha terminado, pero Amaia Salazar regresará con nuevos casos.’” La Voz de Galicia 27 January 2015. Accessed 17 July 2018. https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/fugas/2015/01/27/trilogia-terminado-amaia-salazar-regresara-nuevos-casos/00031422004313420816436.htm.
Schlotterbeck, Jesse. “Non-Urban Noirs: Rural Space in Moonrise, On Dangerous Ground, Thieves’ Highway, and They Live by Night.” M/C Journal 11.5 (2008). Accessed 4 June 2018. http://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/69.
Vallström, Maria. “Living in the Ruins or Buried Alive? Conditions for Sustainable Development in Former Single Industry Communities.” Fraser of Allander Institute Economic Commentary 4 (2013): 37-44. Accessed 4 Jun 2018. https://pure.strath.ac.uk/portal/files/30980436/Special_Issue_No_4_Economic_and_Social_Aspects_of_the_Peripheral_Region_September_2013_1_.pdf.
In fact, if such a characterization of the Deep South is to be believed, perhaps that is why that geographical region of the U.S. has proven to be a fertile breeding ground for the country noir, a “genre […] where the periphery serve[s] as backdrop for all kinds of misery” (Valstrom 40). But more than just the periphery, and more than just a backdrop, the Hispanic version of the country noir is “apresentando uma dimensão antipastoral” (Duarte 20, fn5). The countryside, then, is no longer the restful, beautiful, and peaceful escape from the evils of urban life. It is not just that the countryside has lost its pleasantness and is now an amoral environ; it has transformed into an anti-pastoral site where immorality abounds. The pastoral beatus ille, in sum, has devolved into an arena of evil as pernicious as the urban environ. As Terry Gifford notes, anti-pastoral literature—of which country/rural noir is one example—can be summed up as “Unidealised – harsh, unattractive; […] Problematic – [it] shows tensions, disorder, inequalities; [… and it] Demythologies Arcadia, Eden, Shangri-La” (19). It is my argument that to believe that country noir is merely a typical noir, or hard-boiled, novel set in a rural environment is a bit naïve and cognizant of only one aspect of the subgenre, the setting, while, in fact, there are several distinct characteristics that set country noir apart from more traditional noir. I would even go so far as to suggest that the inclusion of the word “noir” in the nomenclature, as will be seen in the following analysis of Redondo’s Baztán’s trilogy--El guardián invisible (2013), Legado en los huesos (2013), and Ofrenda a la tormenta (2014)—, [1] is somewhat of a misnomer as these novels are closer to the police procedural than they are to traditional noir, or hard-boiled fiction.
Jake Hinkson expounds on “rural noir’s most resonant theme: the burden of kinship,” by explaining that “rural noir locates its stories in the tangled, and sometimes downright twisted, dynamics of family” (35) where “Past and present collide in a way that invokes the famous adage of William Faulkner […] that ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’” (35). Such certainly is a central feature of the Baztán trilogy. The main character, Amaia Salazar, begins the series as a regional police member (policía floral) in Pamplona, Spain, rising to the rank of Head of the Homicide Division by the second novel. She is originally from Elizondo, a small town of some 3,500 people in the Batzán Valley, some 55 kilometers to the north, northeast of Pamplona and only a short distance from the French border. It becomes quite apparent over the course of the trilogy that with the exception of her husband James, a U.S. expatriate and artist, and her aunt Engrasi, Amaia’s family is of questionable, if not obviously criminal, moral character. Perhaps the most disturbing of all is Amaia’s mother Rosario whose past abusive behavior still haunts Amaia in recurring nightmares that result in Amaia suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and unconsciously pointing her weapon at her husband, her sister Ros, and even herself at different points in the works. In El guardián invisible Rosario never actually physically appears on the scene since she is institutionalized due to a severe mental illness, but the reader does learn how some twenty years prior she had attacked the nine-year old Amaia and left her for dead, initially refusing to listen to her husband’s insistence that she go for the doctor. In Legado en los huesos, Rosario violently assaults her nurse and escapes from the aforementioned hospital, immediately going to Engrasi’s house in order to steal away Amaia’s young child and sacrifice him to the mythological god Inguma. Amaia finally arrives on the scene when the knife is already threatening the child and convinces her mother that the child is a boy, and not a girl, at which point Rosario drops the child and leaves the altar site in the cave, disappearing into the stormy night. And in Ofrenda a la tormenta, Rosario unexpectedly appears once again at the hospital where she commits suicide by slashing her own throat while staring at the security camera. All the while, Amaia suffers nightmares and visions of her mother’s verbal and physical threats and unexpectedly uncovers evidence that Rosario had, in fact, intentionally suffocated Amaia’s twin at birth and unsuccessfully attempted the same on Amaia at the same time. Even the Vatican representative, priest Sarasola, who is in town because of the profaning of a church, calls Amaia’s mother “evil” (Legado 271), plainly stating to Amaia that “su madre no está poseída. Es malvada, su alma es tan oscura como la noche” (274).
Amaia’s oldest sister Flora also has a conflictive personality, continually at odds with their middle sister Ros and frequently verbally assaulting Amaia as well, accusing her of having made up the entire story concerning their mother’s attempts on Amaia’s life. Flora verbally incites the killer of the young girls in Guardián, refuses to either reconcile with her estranged husband Víctor or divorce him, admits to Amaia that she is sleeping with the policeman Montes for the sole purpose of obtaining information related to the investigation concerning the killing of the girls, begins ordering flour for the family bakery from another provider in order to steer the police investigation in a different direction, and finally murders the assassin whom she has been inciting when that person, at Rosario’s insistence, kills Flora’s child. In Legado, the reader learns that Flora is the one who had told Rosario that Amaia was going to have a baby girl, even though Flora herself is well aware of the dangers of communicating such. In Ofrenda, Flora’s actions have been such that her sister Ros easily blackmails her into surrendering to Ros her share of the bakery. Ros obviously has little sympathy for Flora, stating, “no quiero pasarme el resto de mi vida bajo el yugo de mi hermana mayor” (Guardián 57), and Amaia thinks Flora is “la reina despótica a la que nada se le escapaba” (416). In fact, Amaia attempts to console Flora’s estranged husband Víctor by telling him that “[Flora] es una cabrona […] Y una hija de puta. […] Una bruja manipuladora y sin corazón” (Guardián 378). When trying to convince her colleague Montes that Flora doesn’t really love him, that she is only using him for her own personal gain, Amaia tells him, “Es mala, Fermín. Flora es mala, le destruirá, acabará con usted, es un puto demonio” (Ofrenda 160). In fact, even the normally calm Engrasi agrees with Amaia that Flora’s initial attempt to buy out Ros’s share of the bakery “no suponía más que un pulso para Flora, una ocasión más para demostrar su fuerza y su dominio” (Ofrenda 400). And if all that is not enough, later in Ofrenda it becomes even more readily apparent that Flora’s moral character is severely compromised when Ros finds Flora’s diary, and Amaia questions Flora about their childhood. In fact, the reader may justifiably wonder if a sequel to the trilogy may be forthcoming in which Flora assumes leadership of the satanic cult inciting the child sacrifices.[2]
While one might sympathize deeply with Amaia because of the obvious trauma and family issues she has been forced to confront her entire life, even she is not exempt from nefarious activities harmful to her own family life. In fact, in Ofrenda her son is only a few months old when she voluntarily cohabitates with the founding cult leader’s son while her husband has gone to the U.S. to be with his father during the elder man’s heart surgery. Even after Amaia finds incriminating evidence proving her lover’s father to be the former cult leader who encouraged the baby sacrifices, her paramour’s interference with the investigation’s advancement, and his murder of Amaia’s assistant, she continues the affair, finding herself inexplicably unable to resist his sexual charms. This, in effect, is yet another example of the past never leaving as overpowering charisma and erotic irresistibleness are the exact traits which had been attributed by others to the cult’s founding leader some twenty years prior.
A second characteristic of “country noir” novels that distinguishes it from traditional noir stories is that the latter have settings generally entirely devoid of the rural while the former, as Schlotterbeck argues, “feature both rural and urban settings […] with the lead character mov[ing] between these two locations by driving […] and nearly all rural noirs are also road movies.” Amaia Salazar, the lead detective, is a policía floral based in Pamplona, but at the onset of the first novel she is assigned the task of leading the investigation into the death of the young girl Ainhoa Eliazsu since she hails from Elizondo, a small village some 50 km from Pamplona and the closest locality to where Ainhoa’s body is found. It is soon discovered that Ainhoa’s death is only the latest in a twenty-year long string of murders of young girls throughout the Batzán Valley, with three others occurring in the first novel alone, and repercussions from those murders leading to other investigations throughout the series. In all three works Amaia spends a considerable amount of time at her aunt Engrasi’s house in Elizondo, but she does occasionally drive back to report to her superiors in Pamplona and increasingly travels throughout the Baztán Valley in her car investigating the various crimes. In El guardián invisible her travels are mainly limited to between Pamplona and Elizondo and around the immediate Elizondo area, with thirteen different trips being recorded. In addition to Amaia’s travels to Pamplona to communicate with her boss and to be at her home, she travels to the Navarre capital from Elizondo to interview Ángel, who had discovered Freddy’s (Ros’s husband) attempted suicide (Guardián 169) and to be present at Johana’s autopsy (Guardián 238). The most distant trip that she takes in Guardián is to Ainsa, some 240 kilometers to the southeast, where the scientists Raúl González y Nadia Takchenko have a laboratory in which they analyze different DNA samples of flours and pastries found on the bodies of the murdered girls (Guardián 306). The only other trip outside of the Baztán Valley that Amaia makes in Guardián is to Irún, some 45 kilometers northwest, where she questions the retired national policeman Alfonso Álvarez de Toledo concerning other questionable deaths of girls in Navarre when he was Head of Homicides years prior (387). All other travels are either in or very close to Elizondo: to the Baztán forest where Amaia originally meets the Huesca scientists searching to see if the girls’ killings are related to bear attacks (86), to Lekaroz, some three kilometers to the northwest of Elizondo, to question Johana’s stepfather about the girl’s death (228), to the Hotel Baztán five kilometers west of town on three different occasions, and to Víctor’s family’s manor on the outskirts of Elizondo where the denouement of the novel occurs.
In Legado en los huesos Amaia travels to Pamplona several times to meet with her superiors, to be at her own home, to be at the trial of Jason Medina, to question Zuriñe Zabaleta about her sister’s death, and to question the priest Sarasola at the church’s hospital there. She also visits Azanza, thirty minutes west of Pamplona, to search for and recover the body of Lucía Aguirre, whom Quiralte has murdered. Once again she travels to the Huesca doctors’ lab in Ainsa for DNA analysis of saliva and hair follicles. She also travels to Entrambasaguas (240 kilometers to the west) to interview a murdered lady’s sister and to Zarautz, (82 kilometers to the northwest) to question her own sister Flora about the murdered girl Anne, Víctor’s relationship with Anne, and Flora’s relationship to her. Other, shorter trips take her around the Baztán Valley, back to the nearby forest, to the nearby village of Arizkun, some six kilometers to the northeast of Elizondo, to inspect the multiple cases of church vandalism and speak with the church officials, and to nearby Irurita (2.5 km to the southwest) and Giltxaurdi, an outlying section of Elizondo.
Ofrenda a la tormenta undoubtedly is the novel in which Amaia travels the most, some 1732 miles (per Google maps) plus multiple excursions around Elizondo, the Baztán Valley and one half-day drive in which she searches for the house where the cult’s activities were/are held. In short, she travels to Pamplona thirteen different times; twice to Etxebertzeko Borda (24 km to the northwest of Elizondo), Irurita (an outlying Elizondo area), Hondarribia (50 km to the northwest), and Ainhoa, France (25.5 km north); and once to Irun, Igantzi, and Madrid (450 km). These trips involve various interviews with suspects, witnesses or family members of dead children, to the Pamplona prison or hospital, to her assassinated colleague Jonan’s house, to a Madrid mental hospital, or to various cemetery’s for the disinterment of child graves. In this last novel, in fact, Amaia seems to be “on the road” more than she is in Elizondo, and the novel seems to exude a constant atmosphere of transit.
Gary Deane names two other characteristics common to rural noir novels, stating that such portray “a world which feels like it’s about to explode in violence and usually does, leaving kith and kin to settle scores and make things right amid a conspiracy of silence.” While there are multiple occurrences of such throughout the series, Ros’s fight with Flora is a prime example of this when the former gives the latter the ultimatum to hand over her share of the bakery, explains why such should occur, and then details the steps she has already taken to assure that Flora will do as she says:
Soy joven y estoy sana, y no espero morir próximamente, pero aun así dispuse, entre otras cosas, que si algo me sucedía, si muero sea como sea, este sobre le sea entregado a nuestra hermana Amaia. Y hay algo que tengo claro, Flora: tu moral y la mía pueden dejar mucho que desear, pero si Amaia llega a conocer el contenido de ese diario no le temblará la mano […] tú sabes, como yo, que ella no aprobaría esto que hago, ni tendría piedad de ti. (Ofrenda 449)
Amaia’s recurring nightmares, in the form of flashbacks throughout the novels, portend future attempts on her child Ibai’s and her own lives while describing past familial violence which even Amaia’s husband knows nothing about prior to wresting the information from Amaia and Engrasi. And the child sacrifices are a hidden secret of the Baztán Valley with former members of the cult extremely hesitant to speak out because, as the one former sect member currently under church and police protection states, “Esperarán [the cult leaders] lo que haga falta, pero cuando ellos vengan a por mí, nadie podrá protegerme” (Ofrenda 411).
Deane’s second stated characteristic of the genre is that “at their core, [rural noir stories] are as much about self and family identity and how people can lose their way and go wrong even while trying to do the right thing.” Obviously, the doctor present at Amaia and her twin’s birth has lost his way. The nurse, a member of the sect that sacrifices baby girls to Inguma, is simply evil, but she convinces Dr. Manuel Hidalgo, her brother, to conceal Rosario’s murderous actions by signing a death certificate stating that Amaia’s twin died of SIDS: “¿Y qué queréis? —preguntó ella, alzando la voz—. ¿Llamar a la policía? ¿Montar un escándalo que salga en los periódicos? ¿Encerrar a una mujer que es una buena madre y que está sufriendo porque tú, hermano mío, cometiste el error de no tratar los síntomas que viste? ¿Le dirás eso a la policía? ¿Qué podrías haber evitado esto con un tratamiento? Destrozarás a esta familia y tu carrera, ¿Lo has pensado?” (Legado 387). Nine years later, when Rosario attacks and almost kills Amaia, Dr. Hidalgo succumbs to his desire to maintain his friendship with Rosario’s husband and not report the incident: “Juan, sabes que somos amigos, sabes que te aprecio. Lo que voy a decirte es entre tú y yo, te lo digo como amigo, no como médico” (Guardián 225). He then proves to Juan that Rosario has attacked Amaia with the intent to kill, and that Amaia’s injuries simply can not be due to an unfortunate accident, but he still is reluctant to report such to the authorities and continues the conspiracy of silence by not doing what is right. “Ahora como amigo y como médico tengo que pedirte que saques a la niña de tu casa, porque corre un grave peligro. Si no lo haces me veré obligado a poner esa denuncia. Te ruego que me entiendas” (Guardián 226). Flora has “doubly” lost her way in that in her desire to maintain traditional ethos, she incites the assassin of the young girls in Guardián to cleanse the valley of sexual promiscuity, and, as Amaia realizes late in the trilogy, Flora simply cannot separate herself from the fact that Rosario is their mother and empathize with Amaia even though she knows the truth about their mother’s threats on Amaia.
Finally, and as stated at the beginning of this essay, the inclusion of the word “noir” in the nomenclature of the subgenre is, I argue, a misnomer. Undoubtedly these novels are detective fiction with significant parallels to other, conspicuous characteristics of the “country noir”, but the fact remains that the Baztán trilogy more closely parallels the police procedural than the hard-boiled variant. Amaia is, after all, a professional police officer who solves the mystery by employing normal police routines in collaboration with other police (Dove 2), and the novels seem to end with a variant of the stereotypical typing up of a triplicate carbon copy summary of the case, even if in parodic form. At the end of Guardián, for example, Flora, when questioned by the police about her murder of Víctor, summarizes the entire investigation, twisting facts related to certain events to make herself appear innocent. Legado climaxes with Amaia’s questioning of Dr. Berasategui and explaining to him how the investigation has led her to him as the principal culpable party; shortly thereafter the narrative closes with Amaia signing off on the packet of documents regarding the missing body parts and her burying the bones of her exhumed relatives in the family plot. And the final scenes of Ofrenda narrate Amaia’s summarizing key parts of the investigation to judge Markina, with subsequent phone calls of condolences and appreciation to individuals who had played important roles in the investigation and its resolution. Thus, essential elements of the police procedural are present in the Baztán trilogy.
In regards to fundamental aspects of the hard-boiled, Lewis Moore argues that violence both by and against the detectives “moves to the fore” (18), stating that such is a principal focus of the genre (17). Leroy Lad Panek posits a distinct language style as “one of the defining features of the hard-boiled story. […] Traditional hard-boiled language begins with non-standard diction—ungrammatical speech, slang, etc.” (8). And René Craig-Odders argues that “In the hard-boiled novel there is always a [femme fatale] around whom the case revolves in some respect” (112). In the Baztán trilogy there is only occasional violence against the detectives: Amaia’s assistant Jonan is murdered, and one of the Huesca scientists is forcibly driven off the road in an attempt by the criminals to impede the DNA analysis of evidence. Aside from that, however, the violence directed toward the detectives is the psychological turbulence—mainly background—that Amaia suffers from nightmares of her mother, and certainly no physical, potentially lethal, violence against Amaia ever actually “moves to the fore” of the narratives. In like manner, the traditional non-standard diction and the femme fatale of the hard-boiled are also missing from this trilogy. Given the synonymous nature of the terms “hard-boiled” and “noir,” then, it is quite apparent that none of the characteristics generally named by critics as fundamental to noir fiction are prominent features of the Baztán trilogy. In fact, these aspects are, for all intents and purposes, absent from Redondo’s works. That is, the Baztán trilogy is set in a rural area, based around a focus on the burden of kinship and the eterno retorno nature of crime and the past in the countryside, and each novel concludes with a summarizing synthesis of the investigation undertaken in that work. While “rural police procedural” or “country police procedural” may not yet be the most accepted nomenclature to describe this relatively new sub-genre of Hispanic fiction, either one is actually a more accurate description of the—perhaps paradoxical—dark and dreary night one can expect when opening the covers of the Hispanic writer Dolores Redondo.
[1]Hereafter referred to as, respectively, Guardián, Legado, and Ofrenda.
[2]Besides the narrative’s indication that Flora knows more about the cult and its activities than she is willing to admit to Amaia, it should be noted that in a 2015 interview with Héctor Porto, Redondo says “La trilogía ha terminado, pero Amaia regresará con nuevos casos. No será inmediatamente, tengo otra novela en la cabeza, ya muy madura. Y después volveré con Amaia.”
Works Cited
Bermejo, Andrea G. “‘El guardián invisible’ El bosque animado.” Cinemanía 258 (March 2014): 86-89.
Craig-Odders, Renée. The Detective Novel in Post-Franco Spain: Democracy, Disillusionment, and Beyond. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1999.
Deane, Gary. “Rural Noir: Taking Refuge.” NoirWorthWatching 11 September 2016. Accessed 4 June 2018. http://noirworthwatching.blogspot.com/2016/09/rural-noir-taking-refuge.html.
Duarte, José. “Um herói real na cidade: Drive (2011), de Nicolas Winding Refn. A Real Hero in the City: Drive (2011), by Nicolas Winding Refn.” Comunicação & Inovação, PPGCOM/US 17.35 (2016): 15-29. Accessed 4 June 2018. http://repositorio.ul.pt/bitstream/10451/27803/1/3729-13240-1-PB.pdf.
Gifford, Terry. “Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral and Post-Pastoral as Reading Strategies.” Accessed 4 June 2018. http://www.terrygifford.co.uk/Pastoral%20reading.pdf.
Hinkson, Jake. “Night and the Country: A History of Rural Noir.” Mystery Scene 133 (2014): 34-36.
Moore, Lewis D. Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920s to the Present. Jeffereson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
MyBookishWays. “Grit Lit: An Intro to Southern Noir.” CrimeFictionLover. 20 January 2013. Accessed 5 June 2018. https://crimefictionlover.com/2013/01/grit-lit-a-southern-noir-intro/.
MysteryPeople. “Down and Dirty in the Country: A Quick Look at Rural Noir.” 3 April 2015. Accessed 5 June 2018. https://mysterypeople.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/down-and-dirty-in-the-country-a-quick-look-at-rural-noir/.
Panek, LeRoy Lad. New Hard-Boiled Writers, 1970s-1990s. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000.
Porto, Héctor J. “Entrevista a Dolores Redondo: ‘La trilogía ha terminado, pero Amaia Salazar regresará con nuevos casos.’” La Voz de Galicia 27 January 2015. Accessed 17 July 2018. https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/fugas/2015/01/27/trilogia-terminado-amaia-salazar-regresara-nuevos-casos/00031422004313420816436.htm.
Schlotterbeck, Jesse. “Non-Urban Noirs: Rural Space in Moonrise, On Dangerous Ground, Thieves’ Highway, and They Live by Night.” M/C Journal 11.5 (2008). Accessed 4 June 2018. http://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/69.
Vallström, Maria. “Living in the Ruins or Buried Alive? Conditions for Sustainable Development in Former Single Industry Communities.” Fraser of Allander Institute Economic Commentary 4 (2013): 37-44. Accessed 4 Jun 2018. https://pure.strath.ac.uk/portal/files/30980436/Special_Issue_No_4_Economic_and_Social_Aspects_of_the_Peripheral_Region_September_2013_1_.pdf.
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