Toni Hill, Author: “I wanted to escape from the psychopath who kills women. It’s all right » | elementary | Culture

Toni Hill (Barcelona, ​​57 years old) is a conscientious crime tourist. Since then he started his career with the international success of Summer of the Dead Toys (2011) with touched The author Héctor Salgado, for example, tried his hand at the Gothic setting The Iron Angels (2017) or the mystery with a supernatural game The Dark Farewell by Teresa Lanza (2021). However, it took a while for him to embark on his most awaited journey: to thriller with Psychopath, a genre in which he successfully pivoted the last executioner (Grijalbo).

“I thought about it for a while, but the approach didn’t come to mind as it wasn’t a repeat of already seen plans. I had a hard time deciding. “It’s a subgenre that doesn’t get a lot of attention: either you do something useful, or you end up making a TV movie at four in the afternoon, and there are a lot of those,” the author comments on the Nebel phone somewhere in Portugal. On a Thursday morning, with the beach in the background. “It’s an off-world place but full of cars,” he comments sardonically.

the last executioner is the story of a serial killer, Thomas Bronte, who kills for specific reasons and with a very gruesome method: the vile mace, the death device that launched Hill’s creative process. “It was the trigger. By chance I came across the biography of Nicomedes Méndez [verdugo que ejerció en Barcelona y perfeccionó la capacidad asesina del artilugio] and a world opened up for me. It’s an instrument that’s all ours, that I find very uncomfortable, that pushes a lot on me, an instrument that’s associated with dirty guys and that I play with a guy who’s the polar opposite.”

Bronte is a quirky gentleman indeed: a Barcelona-based Briton, an art expert, cultured, a man who maintains an interesting and rich social circle with a touch of dandy indifference, and whoever he sees fit, he brutally kills deserved it. He likes to provoke and is characterized above all by an amorality that brings him closer to Thomas Ripley than Hannibal Lecter. “There were no red lines, but I wanted to run from the psychopath who kills women. “It’s good enough,” Hill explains. “I wanted to create a psychopath that I could empathize with. It cannot be that a police officer is deployed.” And in this game of empathy for the monster there is a risk that the author admits he is happy to take.

The reader knows right away who the killer is, which multiplies the value of Lena Mayoral, a criminal psychologist trying to figure out why, a character full of nuances who at times grows into the protagonist. “In the face of the monster, I wanted a very normal person who would get away from the latest, cool cops and Lisbeth Salander heirs: I wanted the typical normal and ordinary girl, but who had her own story, and which wasn’t perfect either brought up with the values ​​of the last century (competitive with yourself, very demanding, etc.), a person who is not easy to love, or that is the feeling he has. It’s the opposite of frivolity.”

Hill has marked his literary path with certain recognizable aspects throughout his seven novels. Here, for example, Bronte is shaped by traumatic events that happened in his childhood, as they also happened to the protagonists of crystal tiger (2018). “It’s a way of explaining a character. It’s in childhood that you get your first feelings about the world, whether it loves you or not. We all remember not concrete things, but sensations.”

Hill prides himself on going from “translator who writes to writer who translates” and sees many benefits in his work translating novels from English into Spanish beyond the peace of mind at the end of the month . “It gives you the discipline to sit down at the computer and produce multiple pages. Although this cannot be translated into writing in the same way, it helps not to get up from your chair every five minutes. And it also gives you the taste for cleaning the language. When translating, you have to assume that you will never do the same thing: the end result has to be very similar, but the parts are different.”

It seems they’re selling some kind of thriller that’s not mine, it’s not my tone and I thought maybe I’ve fallen behind

In an increasingly competitive environment the last executioner has become one of the thriller of summer. When asked about the status of the matter, the author of Hiroshima lovers He sees in detective fiction “people who do things very well” and believes that complexity has been lost, although, as in any exposed and exploited genre, “quality goes up and down”. However, Hill was surprised by the book’s success: “It kind of seems to be selling.” thriller It’s not mine, it’s not my tone, and I thought maybe I’ve fallen behind.”

It’s not the first time that success has surprised him. In 2011 he was a translator who had always wanted to write, with a few stories in his drawer and one idea: to put Barcelona back at the center of black crime history. From there arises the surprising journey of Summer of the Dead Toys: “It was like something you don’t believe in: if you get to know the publishing world from the inside, you know that very little happens. It was so over the top! It was very simple that everything ended there. It was a detective story set in Barcelona in 2010, the hip city of the time, and it was a character that worked because people followed him… but it was released right in the pocket: that was the case be that typical Carrefour book. So I deliver it, they pay me little, and after a while they come back with seven translations they bought at the Turin Fair. Then there were 19. That gave us enormous dizziness.” Paradoxes of triumph, especially when it comes unexpectedly: It can bring as many joys as sorrows.

His first bestseller was followed by two more novels, with which he completed this trilogy, his purely police experiment. But the uncertainties remained: “I was afraid that my career would end when Salgado was finished. I didn’t just want to make police films: there are many more facets to the genre to explore. I wanted to open up my world.” Now he has a trip into the world in mind thriller historical, so fashionable, although he would also like to write horror – “but it is very difficult” – and to complete the options he has left the protagonists’ paths open The Last Executioner. It only remains to decide what will be the next stop on Toni Hill’s journey through the vast landscapes of detective fiction.