Agustin Martinez: We also want to know. There was a lot of noise that three men signed with a female pseudonym, controversy without much substratum, the pseudonym is part of the history of literature.
P.: It’s just that you made that bourgeois algebra teacher who decides to become a novelist too real.
Jorge Diaz: We only said that she was a school teacher and someone said she was from the university, and someone said she was a professor of algebra, and we don’t even know what algebra is, we are of letters. Mola was the game of three friends: we are going to make a soap opera, and one never expects things to become a success, one tries all one’s life and succeeds where one least expects it. We weren’t going to do a biography of Carmen, but we had to say something about her on the cover of the book, and that’s how it turned out that she’s a teacher, that her children are older and that’s why she writes. What for us was silly became something aspirational: now I can do what I wanted to do so much in my life. Carmen was a good character, despite ourselves.
Q.: A lady who writes grim crime novels.
JD: She was truculent before she was a woman, and before she was three men. We made some novels that were a bit truculent and then we said whose they were. We wanted the novels to defend themselves, without the need to have behind an author who has I don’t know how many followers on social networks and we didn’t have any of that. Well, we had to be screenwriters, and it is not true that television ends with readers, television ends with authors, you live so well that you don’t want anything else.
Q.: Well, now they have Mola, who has already had a trilogy of successful novels.
Anthony Mercer: Tetralogy, because now the fourth installment is coming out. I don’t know how many we’ll do as long as we don’t get tired of ourselves and the character.
Q.: How do you write a novel of three?
A.M: We often work as a team not only in writing scripts but also in creating television series. The advantage of the odd number is that there is no hierarchy that decides above the others, and if there is a point of disagreement, you have to vote and decide, and continue moving forward.
JD: We discovered that the script can be carried over to novels. “The Gypsy Bride”, Mola’s first, began with a gypsy woman who was killed before her wedding, and each one added a “and yes…” until we reached the complete plot and the story we wanted to tell. As scriptwriters we look for a powerful start, turning points, surprises, the characters, the underlying theme, with the maxim of not boring. They are very rewritten novels by all, very battered, which requires us to accept and respect the talent of others.
Q.: In “The Beast” they made a 19th century novel with a lot of Galdós and Dickens.
JD: Both Dickens and Galdós are our beacons. We had been working on the series of inspector Elena Blanco, which are thrillers, and we wanted to get out of the comfort zone, put Carmen Mola to the test to see if, in addition to contemporary police, she could enter a different story. The headline we worked with was: Dickens passed through the crusher of Carmen Mola, an orphan girl in a very unequal society who finds allies and enemies, which leads us to a portrait of the time, and there we add Galdós, Larra, Innkeeper Romanos and Victor Hugo.
Q.: Did giving the award to “The Beast” help Planeta to get three thriller authors out of Penguin Random House?
JD: You don’t get the prize if you don’t show up. We said to ourselves: we have a novel that has won a lot of Planeta prizes, why don’t we try it? We had to end the anonymity of Carmen Mola, because they were going to catch us and out of vanity, it can’t be that you have a success and nobody knows it’s you. The Planet allowed us to say that this is us. We have not been robbed, we have introduced ourselves. And Elena Blanco’s next novel “Las madres” comes out again in Penguin’s Alfaguara. We play for River and Boca at the same time.
Q.: And now what are they up to?
A.M: The first season of the adaptation of “The Gypsy Bride” is being completed, and we intend to write individual novels. The three of us have novels published before Carmen Mola and the award is taking us to places where we couldn’t get to before.
Source: Ambito
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