Julio Carreras undertakes his second novel with as much passion as the first. After his achievement The Secret of Painite (lizard, 2016), introduces us Ship A-122 (lizard, 2018) under the same motivations and objectives, but also obtaining other unexpected surprises. It manages to combine the suspense that originates from the investigations of the sagacious police inspector Matías Fonseca regarding the disappearance of 69 classic cars at the Barcelona Automobile Museum, with a simple style of contemporary language that immediately connects with the reader. All of this agilely peppered with narrative twists to past decades and the indelible aroma of great songs from the rockl. SERGIO BELLO
How do you value this experience of having written your second novel?? Will the reader detect a development or change of style with respect to your first novel??
I'm not giving you any scoop by telling you that it has been very gratifying... Perhaps the main difference compared to the first is the pressure to which you are subjected. In a first novel you are always surrounded by endless doubts such as: will it be liked??, Am I measuring the reader's tension correctly??, What the hell am I doing writing a novel??, etc. Overcome those barriers, in Ship A-122 I have felt freer, I have been able to be a little more thuggish and it shows in the style: I have combined intrigue with certain doses of humor, I have taken the characters towards more extreme personalities. Y, of course, With experience I have improved the style.
Have you had any particular author as a reference or influence to create this story??
Not consciously, but of course when you write you reflect in a certain way what you read. Yes, there are people who have told me that they remind me, by the way the research is carried out, to the novels of Lorenzo Silva, which to me is a compliment. Something that I have also done in this novel has been to link each chapter with a song by rock’n’roll, one of the passions I share with the main character. It's not something new, I've seen it in some other book but I couldn't tell you which one.. This has also been the perfect trigger for The Pirate, by Rock FM, he made me the introduction of the book.
What was your source selection process like?, documentation?
It could be said that in this novel the documentation came to me almost before the idea. One day, wandering around the internet I saw a documentary about the A-122 ship, the place where SEAT keeps its classic cars… It seemed like the ideal place to start a novel.; y , just a few days later, on a trip through the Tena valley, They told me the story of a strange plane crash that occurred in World War II.. Two fascinating stories and a continuous whirring in my head: he cocktail perfect to start a good novel. From there: internet, phone calls, a couple of trips around the area to gather information... Everything necessary to recreate a story in the most credible way possible.
We sense that your concerns are already leading you to new projects... perhaps towards other fields such as comics? (script), or even poetry? Or will you continue down the path of fictional fiction?
Projects? ¡Miles! My head is like a whirlwind of ideas... The hardest thing for me is deciding which one to bet on since, with three children, a job, a few more hobbies, I have to make the most of the time I have to write. Now, yes I give you a scoop, I have two challenges that “pull” me a lot: a novel about a great deception to fulfill a person's last wish, with high doses of intrigue; and a collection of stories about salmon people, people going in the opposite direction. For this last one I am taking inspiration from real cases, so if there are any AU readers who are salmon and have a good story... I'm all ears!!
