Books

A Welshman’s view of a sinister Girona

Chris Lloyd has published his third crime novel in pure Nordic noir style set in the provincial capital with a Mossa d’Esquadra policewoman as the protagonist

The Scan­di­na­vian noir novel has been fash­ion­able for some time now. There is al­ready an ex­ten­sive range of books in this genre, with new finds pop­ping up all the time. What’s more, the lit­er­ary phe­nom­e­non’s in­flu­ence on other Eu­ro­pean writ­ers is ev­i­dent. Yet, per­haps some­thing that many peo­ple in Girona do not know is that a Welsh writer, Chris Lloyd, has been gain­ing in­creas­ing at­ten­tion in the UK, Ire­land, the US, Canada, Aus­tralia and New Zealand, for his se­ries of de­tec­tive nov­els, all writ­ten in pure Nordic noir style, and all set in the city of Girona and its sur­round­ing area.

The ap­par­ently per­fect Girona of the books could just about be any other city or town in Swe­den, Den­mark or Ice­land. Yet the city hides an un­der­belly of crime and human dark­ness. And, in keep­ing with the con­ven­tions of the pop­u­lar lit­er­ary genre, there is also a de­tec­tive, in this case Mossa d’Es­quadra Elisenda Domènech, who takes on the task of solv­ing the mys­ter­ies that de­velop be­fore her.

City of Drowned Souls

After the suc­cess of City of Good Death and City of Buried Ghosts, the au­thor re­cently brought out, once again with the on­line pub­lisher Canelo, and avail­able on Ama­zon for the Kin­dle, the third book in the se­ries: City of Drowned Souls, with a front cover show­ing Girona’s Pont de Pedra under a sin­is­ter night sky, help­ing to set the scene of dark sus­pense.

The Cardiff-born writer made his debut in 2015 with City of Good Death, which at­tracted his first read­ers with a tale of crime and mys­tery in­formed by Girona’s local leg­ends and mythol­ogy. Yet, the au­thor’s tales are mod­ern and re­al­is­tic, and in­clude de­tails of every­day life in today’s Girona and Cat­alo­nia, such as the cur­rent ten­sions be­tween so­ci­ety and the State.

Lloyd thinks Girona is the ideal place to set a noir novel and, as with the tra­di­tion of locked-room mys­ter­ies, the ac­tion can take place in a lim­ited space in which all the sus­pects are likely to be known to each other. “The idea was al­ways to take the con­ven­tions of Nordic noir and trans­plant them to the Mediter­ranean,” he says, adding that “one of the biggest chal­lenges is find­ing that mid­dle ground be­tween writ­ing for Eng­lish-speak­ing read­ers who per­haps do not know Cat­alo­nia so that they can enjoy the sto­ries and travel around Cat­alo­nia in their imag­i­na­tions and, at the same time,for some­one from Girona it­self to be able to recog­nise their home.”

In this first book, Lloyd in­tro­duced his read­ers to his lead­ing char­ac­ter, Elisenda Domènech, his very own Wal­lan­der. She is a char­ac­ter in con­stant evo­lu­tion, who is soli­tary, stub­born, with a clear moral sense and great loy­alty to her peo­ple and her home. “Here too we go back to the idea of Nordic noir as well as Scot­tish writ­ers, such as Val Mc­Der­mind, Ian Rankin and Stu­art MacBride, in which the land and the en­vi­ron­ment cre­ate the char­ac­ter,” he says. He com­pares Elisenda Domènech to Girona’s old quar­ter, the Barri Vell, be­cause it is “tra­di­tional but lively, age-old but al­ways evolv­ing, with fa­cades that hide sto­ries and se­crets, con­ti­nu­ity and rup­ture.”

One, two, three...

Lloyd’s sec­ond book, City of Buried Ghosts (2016), is set in the city of Girona but also in­cludes nearby Baix Em­pordà. The novel tells the story of a po­lice in­ves­ti­ga­tion into a dead body found in an ar­chae­o­log­i­cal dig. The third book, City of Drowned Souls, came out only re­cently, and the ac­tion re­turns to the cap­i­tal to focus on the dis­ap­pear­ance of the son of a pop­ulist – though not very pop­u­lar – politi­cian dur­ing the elec­tion cam­paign for the Cata­lan par­lia­ment. The re­lease of this third book in as many years has pro­vided a con­ti­nu­ity for read­ers that has seen sales rise ac­cord­ingly. The au­thor says that he has just fin­ished doing a blog tour of the United King­dom to pub­li­cise his work, and that the re­cep­tion in blog­gers’ com­ments has been very pos­i­tive. He even says that it has raised more in­ter­est in Cat­alo­nia, with some of the blog­gers post­ing a photo with tomato bread after fin­ish­ing one of his books.

And his plans and as­pi­ra­tions for the fu­ture? “To con­tinue the saga and to see my books pub­lished in Cata­lan,” Lloyd says.

From Cardiff to Catalonia and back again

It seems Chris Lloyd has always been a restless soul. As a child he lived in West Africa and after graduating from university, where he studied Spanish and French, he left Cardiff for Catalonia, where he settled for 24 years. He first came to know Girona in 1979 as a student, during the “fascinating” political and social Transition. He studied Spanish, but fell in love with Catalan, its people and the country, which meant he returned to Girona to work as an English teacher. “Perhaps because I am Welsh, the Catalan language and culture appealed to me,” he says. He went on to work for a publisher in Bilbao, Barcelona, Madrid... and returned to Wales, where he wrote tourist guides on Catalonia. He lives there still, working as a writer and a translator.

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