From Police Station to Page: The Birth of a Tenerife Noir Saga
Psychologist, police command officer at the South Commissariat in Tenerife, and author of the novel Los Llanos de Troya (Real Noir), Ángela Pinacho Gómez (Santander, 1980) brings to life a dark plot featuring Inspector Diana Uribe. The inspector must solve the murder of a transgender sex worker linked to a well-known politician from a conservative party on the island. “There’s a lot of me in how she operates and leads her team, but not so much in the things that happen around her… People who have read the book ask me, ‘But is this true?’ and I tell them no, no, no… That this is all fiction,” explains the professional, currently assigned to the Scientific Police Brigade. She has previously served in a judicial police unit, a Public Safety group, and worked as a student tutor. She has also operated with the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) in Spain, Slovakia, and Poland.
A Reluctant Writer Inspired by Reading Clubs
“I’m an avid reader, but I never thought about writing for others. I belong to two reading clubs [one associated with Tenerife Noir and the Club Refugio in Adeje] and one of the activities was to write some texts. The story of Manuel was well-received, and I entered it into a competition created by the National Police. It didn’t win the prize, but I started thinking about what to do with it: should I put it in a drawer and forget it, or start developing it further?” Her journey into writing began in earnest after attending a Tenerife Noir event featuring Carlos Salem, the Argentine crime novelist and journalist, who spoke about crafting stories. After finishing Los Llanos de Troya—named after an area in Arona known for prostitution—she sent the text to Salem for feedback.
From Manuscript to Published Debut
“In my circle, no one was linked to the literary world, and he corrected manuscripts. He read it and called me to say that ‘a couple of things needed polishing because it had great potential.’ He also hinted that it could be the start of a series.” Salem made the process easy, not least by revealing he worked for a small Madrid-based crime fiction publisher aimed at new authors. He offered to publish it free of charge. “It was a great opportunity,” Pinacho states. The publisher’s blurb, penned by Salem, describes it as “a story told with sobriety and a credible, likeable protagonist in her dual, sometimes exhausting, role as a mother and head of a police investigation group.”
Fiction Rooted in a Harsh Reality
The author is keen to clarify that her novel is not a direct attack on corruption in Arona specifically, but on corruption in Spain more generally. “Some of the things I recount did happen in this municipality, but I didn’t live here at the time. I found out later.” She suggests the south of Tenerife may harbour more corruption or crime than other parts of the island due to its significant economic power: “The bad guys are always where large sums of money move. People come here from all over the world. It’s one of the best places, but police work is increasingly effective—though some might slip through the net for a while [pause]…”
The Influences Behind the Inspector
Pinacho credits her literary influences more to her reading habits than her profession, though she acknowledges the latter plays a part. “More than my job, which I don’t deny has had some influence, my greatest inspiration has been the reading I’ve done since my adolescence, which was mostly crime and police novels. I like historical fiction, but I’m not in that genre yet. My luck is working in a field where I handle material quite conducive to these types of plots.” Does her work provide direct storylines? “A little bit, yes,” she laughs. “Readers who have written comments about the novel note that ‘everything seems very real.’ It is fiction, although after finishing the book I learned that in the 90s, more or less, there apparently was a murder of a transgender sex worker in the area where the action takes place. That’s what I like to read; this didn’t happen, but I can believe it.”
A Plot of Power and Intrigue
At its heart, Los Llanos de Troya is a veiled critique of political corruption. Inspector Uribe and her team must uncover who is responsible for the death. The investigation begins in the underworld of southern Tenerife and escalates to a sphere inhabited by the island’s high-ranking political officials. The result, promises the author, is “an intense plot but, at the same time, very fun and entertaining.”
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