Two commissioners, a hanged and a mystery on the island of the volcano

In this fiction by Nicolás Melini, which takes place on La Palma Island, the eruption of the volcano happens in the capital, Santa Cruz -in reality freed from the ashes in the outbreak of an old summit. “Do not worry, you don’t have to regret fatal victims,” ​​says Melini, when talking about his novel ‘The tourist without luggage’, in which a man appears hung in a forest of this Atlantic island. As in the mystery classics, there are two commissioners, one expert and another rookie, who must elucidate if it is suicide, as it seems.

“They are very good police,” summarizes Melini, born on this Canary Island. «And it is possible that the tourist is not exactly a tourist and has traveled with the rope as the only luggage. The German is part of the idiosyncrasy of the island. As a child, in La Palma we have seen how a stable German population has grown. And other places too ».

The palm has its own rules and lives under the influence of the “palm sneer,” says the author, “which is a kind of kind Cainism, a malice not exempt from bonhomy. And of course this is found in some situations and characters. But maybe it is above all in how the story is told. I don’t know if there is something invisible for foreign. Maybe for them there is a plus of mystery, but I don’t know. It is very difficult to foresee the experiences of readers, who are always diverse and personal ».

A messiah and a script

The plot also has ritual violence and a charismatic leader. «The Messiah is in many of our stories. I will only say that things happen in a proud city of its Catholicism, which exhibits crosses through all its corners, and that it carries the cross even in its name, Santa Cruz de la Palma ».

This story was around Melini since 1997, when he began to become a script that now became a novel. «Federico Luppi was going to be Commissioner Nieves, but I had to give up making the movie«, he recalls. »To write the novel I had to forget what was in the script, which was also insufficient because these are nothing more than a step towards a definitive work, which is the film. In literary writing, everything in history has to be at once, in each sentence, in each paragraph ».