Translation Rights TQE / Silver Bullets

Balas de plata was unanimously chosen the winner to the III Tusquets Editores Prize for Novel and consecrates Élmer Mendoza as a top-notch novelist. The jury, made up of Juan Marsé (as chairman), Almudena Grandes, Jorge Edwards, Evelio Rosero, and Beatriz de Moura, valued the “raging modernity in the use of language, the narrative structure that has much to do with the language inspired by television, and the hellish rhythm that, as in the best classical novel, does not allow the reader a break until its final outcome”. The author himself says, “I aspire for my readers to fear dying before finishing the book.”

Police agent Edgar “Left-handed” Mendieta is crushed after having been abandoned by the woman he loved, he is in dire need of a psychoanalyst, and his work keeps piling up, when he takes on the murder case of Bruno Canizales. Canizales, a prestigious lawyer with a double life, son of the ex-minister of Agriculture, is found dead with a silver bullet through his head. Mendieta’s cell phone does not cease to ring with calls from his superior with news about new corpses in only a matter of days. Who is behind these murders? Drug traffickers? Politicians agitated by the upcoming elections? The members of the Small Universal Fraternity to which Canizales belonged? With great humor and loads of adrenaline, the investigation takes place in dumps and in mansions and offers a mix of reporters, beautiful lesbians, and an intricate bundle of perverse interests. The only one who is really convinced to get to the heart of the matter and impose justice is Mendieta. Probably because he has nothing left to lose.

“One of the great names of current Mexican literature, as time will tell... A pure narrator who does not criticize nor defend the novel, but rather tells it.”

Arturo Pérez-Reverte, El Universal

About El amante de Janis Joplin

“Seduced by oral narration, we are shocked by the unending succession of events. His narrative art and creation of characters reveal that we are before an artist.”

Arturo García Ramos, ABC Cultural

“Élmer Mendoza establishes a new path in crime fiction… The author makes clear what André Gide demanded of all novelists: To have ample knowledge of the subject treated. Mendoza does, and that is why his novel evolves with a looseness and disinhibition that was much needed in Mexican literature.”

 Daniel Sada

“Mendoza presents a universe that is both excessive and real, and an antihero that is as real as he is adorable.”

José Luis Charcán, La Razón

Élmer Mendoza was born in Culiacán (México) in 1949. He is a professor at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. He coordinates seven groups of starting novelists throughout Mexico. From 1978 to 1995, he published five volumes of short stories and two of chronicles, and in 1999, his first novel, Un asesino solitario (A Lonely Killer), which immediately situated him, according to the Mexican literary critic Federico Campbell, as “the first narrator who manages a true account of the effects of drug trafficking in our country”. El amante de Janis Joplin (The Lover of Janis Joplin) was awarded the XVII José Fuentes Mares National Literary Prize and Efecto Tequila (Tequila Effect) was a finalist, in 2005, to the Dashiell Hammett Prize. In 2006, his fourth novel, Cóbraselo caro (Make It Expensive) was published. Arturo Pérez-Reverte has said about Mendoza, “He is my friend and my teacher. The Queen of the South was born from the taverns, the narcocorrido music and his novels.”