A journalist and a young adult fiction writer, Argentinian author Sergio Olguín has made waves in the crime fiction genre with his Verónica Rosenthal novels. Based in Buenos Aires, Verónica is a powerful character – an investigative journalist unafraid of authority, with a stong sense of justice and quite a sex drive too. Now, the fourth book in the series – The Best Enemy – is arriving in English. It continues on from The Fragility of Bodies, The Foreign Girls and There Are No Happy Loves – all novels we have reviewed and enjoyed.
It’s not often we get to interview an Argentine writer, so we invited Sergio to join us on the site to talk about his new novel, Veronica and more. Like the book, this piece was translated by Miranda France.
What will crime fiction lovers like about The Best Enemy?
I hope they will like the plot, which for the first time is international. The starting point is a macabre event that takes place in Gaza and has repercussions in Argentina. After the murder of the former editor of the magazine where she works, Verónica Rosenthal has to investigate the dark web that links political and media power in Argentina with the secret services of foreign countries. It’s a thriller that also aspires to be a tribute to one of my favourite authors, John Le Carré.
Where did the idea for your investigative journalist Verónica Rosenthal come from and how have you developed her over the series?
In Argentina there are no private investigators and the police are generally more likely to commit crimes than solve them. That means we authors have to be resourceful in finding our investigators: they may be lawyers, journalists or work for the judiciary. Verónica is an old-school reporter who prefers to hit the pavement rather than conduct her research online. She’s not afraid to take on some powerful adversaries, but she also likes a drink and enjoys the good life and the company of her friends. Throughout the series Verónica grows in maturity and experience. Everything that happens to her changes her character, although at heart she stays the same.
What are the themes you wanted to explore in the story and why are they important to you?
I was interested in probing the links between the media and power. At the same time, I felt that the genocide in Palestine demanded a response. In Argentina it’s a difficult subject to discuss.
I knew I was getting into trouble by writing about it, but I thought it was a good literary exercise not to allow myself to succumb to self-censorship. I also wanted to tell the story of Verónica’s maternal grandfather, an Eastern European Jew, a communist militant, who lived in Palestine and decided to move to Argentina in the late 1940s.
You have also worked as a journalist. How is Verónica similar, or different, to you?
I always worked in cultural journalism, which is the easy and fun way to do it: you get to talk about books, movies, television. But I deeply admire investigative journalists. Verónica is the journalist I was not, but dreamed of being. Everything she says about the profession reflects my own opinion. I really enjoy exploring in fiction what other journalists do in the real world.
The other books in the series bring a gritty realism, and a lot of passion with Veronica’s sex drive. What kind of feeling did you want to capture in the story and what you depict?
To paraphrase one of my most beloved writers, Marguerite Yourcenar: you can never understand the connection between two people if you don’t know what they get up to in bed. I share that view. We wouldn’t know Veronica so deeply if we didn’t know how she embodies her sexuality. Generally I get very bored writing description but sex scenes are an exception because what I describe creates in the reader a universe of his or her own, different even, perhaps, to the one I wrote. Sex scenes are where the imagination and fantasies of the writer and the reader come together best.
We don’t see many Argentine crime novels translated into English. What is the mystery novel scene like in Argentina, and what has been the reaction to your English translations so far?
The detective novel in all its forms – the classic thriller and the crime novel – is practically our national genre. There are many writers producing crime fiction. It’s a way to talk about what is happening to us as a society, of getting into areas that would be difficult to broach in another genre. As for the English translation of my novels, I feel privileged that Bitter Lemon has shown such interest in Verónica Rosenthal. I’m very grateful and each new volume that appears brings me great joy. It isn’t easy for Spanish-language authors to find a place in the English-language market. I hope my books can continue to reach English-speaking readers.
The Fragility of Bodies became a TV series. Are there any plans for your three other books to appear on screen?
There are several proposals for series or movies, but nothing that has materialised so far. There is even a French adaptation which already has a script but hasn’t yet been filmed. I hope that these various projects will come to fruition in the coming years.
Which crime novel authors and books have inspired you and your work, and what are you reading at the moment?
I could fill pages talking about the books that influenced me but I will try to be brief. For me Nordic crime fiction was an important discovery because their outlook is so different from the traditional machismo of the North American crime novel. I really like some classic detective novels that come from a more marginal place, such as those by Horace McCoy and John Franklin Bardin. As for my current reading, it’s very chaotic: Ryu Murakami – ‘the talented Murakami’, I like to call him, because I’m not a fan of Haruki – The Balkan Trilogyby Olivia Manning (I think I’m in love with Harriet and I hate her pusillanimous husband) and El hombre amansado by Horacio Castellanos Moya, one of the great current Latin American storytellers.
What’s next for Verónica, and what’s next for Sergio Olguín?
The new Verónica Rosenthal novel, called Media Verónica, in reference to a move in bullfighting, will be published in May. It’s actually two novels together: one is a kind of detective story featuring her father Aarón in the 70s, shortly before the last military dictatorship began in Argentina, and the other is set in the present time and shows Verónica dealing with the pain of her father’s terminal illness. This second story has more to do with emotional ties and unfinished business in families.
I still haven’t decided what my next literary project will be: a new Verónica story, a thriller set in France at the beginning of the 20th century – it would be the second in a series – or writing about my maternal family, an old project that keeps getting postponed.
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