In Catalan and Spanish we have the possibility of recovering Shane Stevens (New York, 1941-2007), a forgotten author except for the most sophisticated gourmets of the genre. The biggest problem with accessing his novels – eight, written between 1966 and 1985 and then disappearing as an author even under his pseudonym J. W. Rider – is that he has been read and copied so much by the authors who came after him that some of his characters and situations sound familiar to us. to déjà-vu. His fifth novel – By reason of insanity, from 1979 – sold what he wanted and more in the United States and among his new readers there were surely some of the future scriptwriters or producers of series like The Sopranos.
But, beyond that certain reading discomfort, it is a pleasure to re-read these pages almost freshly experienced, when the author almost records live what he sees around him. It’s a relief after reading books and books that only try to sell us representations of representations of things they have read in other books or seen on platforms from the couch at home.
Stevens takes us back to New Jersey in the early seventies – the novel is from 1973 – in the struggle in the streets of small traffickers and big gangsters for power, money and, in a way, to keep their share of the American dream. . The author does not spare us the cruelty and nihilism of what he sees and tells in a country at the beginning of its moral bankruptcy, Vietnam with its lies and its dead.
Book by book, Alicante writer Saljo Bellver finds his own voice for plots that, with the excuse of genre, go further, containing an innate nose for adventure, rhythm and the desire to entertain and be entertained.
One of the best pairings of the noir genre is with the historical genre. Especially if its author, Antoni Roca on this occasion, does not neglect the historical context in which to place a good plot: a Europe that we know is on the brink of the end and its characters are not.
No one would have to lose sight of Tuli Márquez (1962). He has a talent for talking about the here and now, the us of a non-lumpen middle class in the face of the economic abyss or its inanity, with solvency and credibility. Good hand for plots, dialogues, scenes: thoroughbred novelist.
