Juan Cu, that is, Juan Curcio Moreno, the protagonist of this tasty and well-told detective story, immediately calls to mind the unnamed, peculiar, and delirious detective from The Mystery of the Haunted Crypt, one of Eduardo Mendoza’s most splendid books. Alongside Inspector Sergio Planes, who isn’t exactly in top form in his late-career phase, they form a curious pair that, little by little, earns the reader’s affection.
A kind of, saving the distance, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Murcian style —in the city of the Segura the events recounted here unfold— who
are capable of complementing each other with decorum, using one another for comfort.
Because, while Cu remains a prisoner who, thanks to his cinephile knowledge, is given the opportunity to take part in a criminal investigation, the veteran Planes, already weathered by life, is a widower, an expert in mediation of kidnappings, overwhelmed by new technologies and forever blaming himself for everything.
Soon he will realize that Juan Cu has become the person with whom he has had the most contact since he became a widower. In a moment of reflection, in the solitude of his house —Solitude is, precisely, the name of the woman he loved so much—, whose walls seem to close in on him, he realizes that it was July eleventh, 2010, exactly the night of Iniesta’s goal, when the streets overflowed with flags and jubilation, with car horns as background music, when he met Juan Curcio, Cu to friends, who at the time was an ordinary thirty-year-old man, of normal height, slender, hawk-like nose, rebellious hair, and protruding eyes, resembling actor Adrien Brody, the one from the film The Pianist. Later, Planes will take charge of his friend’s obsession with cinema, of that compulsive habit of watching films in uninterrupted succession, one after another, to the point of, like the illustrious Manchegan hidalgo, confusing reality with fiction. Or turning the film’s message into reality.
Jesús Boluda, the author of this tale, whose pulse remains alive and active through the splendid and well-considered final pages, with a successful epilogue that recalls the best noir films, creates the conducive atmosphere for his story to work wonderfully, without having to resort to the usual tricks. Murcia is not New York, we know that. Not even a great metropolis like Barcelona or Madrid where so many novels of that same style have unfolded. In any case, as Francisco García Pavón once said, a little besieged by the strictest critics and by skeptical readers, in Tomelloso —the Manchegan place where the exploits of detective Plinio and his assistant Don Lotario take place— only the strictly necessary is killed.” Boluda does not err by dwelling on the landscape of the Southeast, nor does he bring up its beautiful Huerta or its dashing cathedral; he does not linger on its rich gastronomy, with its rice dishes, vegetables, and paparajotes, nor does he try to “sell” the qualities of a city still unknown to tourists. It is, in short, a backdrop that functions as a wide cinema hall in which all the events will unfold. In fact, perhaps with the aim of distancing himself from all those clichés that adorn this place, Boluda, stepping off the script, gives us a Murcia with unusual weather, with clouds and rain, even though we are in January 2019.
Because cinema, precisely, is, if one analyzes the work in depth, the true protagonist of this tale. And not only due to the films that come to light and that, by the way, serve so that a cinephile like Juan Cu can decisively help solve the case of a serial killer. Jesús Boluda, with good judgment, incorporates in these pages many of the cinematographic techniques well known to all: from a script that the killer himself elaborates, leaving no detail unaddressed, to the comments that arise along the way, with a not-so-innocent or improvised allusion to the Rex cinema, the last great venue that has been closed to the public, with great controversy about what it will become in the future, in the city of Murcia. Cinema and more cinema with which the reader interested in this art is invited to get involved in the investigation of the case.
Hemingway, who—though not at the peak of his moment—once said that only one eighth of a novel is completely visible. This is what has come to be known as the “Iceberg Theory.” Thus the remaining portion, much larger, remains hidden and implicit, awaiting the reader, astute and complicit, to decipher it. Jesús Boluda does not play to the crowd, nor does he recoil from the natural demands of readers of this genre. On the contrary, he keeps many aces up his sleeve and, without the need for useless recaps or summaries to show where the plot is headed — another of the great ills of contemporary crime fiction — creates a story whose background must be analyzed in depth to extract greater flavor and substance from a seemingly light book. It should not be forgotten that a prisoner, somewhat philosophical, a lover of books and a cinephile, imprisoned for a cause we might consider “noble,” and a police officer on the brink of retirement, somewhat skeptical — with that skepticism typical of one of those Baroja-like characters —, a tired, widowed old dinosaur, what they are really seeking is not so much a serial killer who terrifies a small town, but rather to embark on a journey to the depths of themselves in search of those stimuli that will revive the lost enthusiasm and recover the faith misplaced in some corner of that serious life.
The rest of the characters, apart from Cu and Inspector Planes, who shine on their own, more than fulfill their role: the young journalist Patricia Santamaría, who gradually enters Planes’s dull life, the police officer Antonio Navarro, who resents the involvement of the prisoner in the case, the forensic photographer Fulgencio Sola and others, such as Trinidad Torres, Barriga Martínez, with a broad smile and a caricatured face, fellow inmates of Cu, or prison official Antonio Jávega, who lend greater truth and realism to this story.
The humor, occasionally a touch cynical, which is on display here, the fluency and correctness of the language, suitable for a story of these characteristics, which becomes even brighter with the use of agile and witty dialogue, as well as certain descriptions, some superb images and pithy lines that do not go unnoticed by the reader (“There is nothing more real than a dead man”), connect Fuera de plano with the classics, with the most respectable, pure and sacred of a genre that, today, too many, with such venom, mistreat.
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Author: Jesús Boluda del Toro. Title: Fuera de plano. Publisher: Roca. Sale: Todos tus libros.