Translation Rights TQE / Just Another Corpse

A family member gives Sancho Bordaberri trunks full of books, and so he decides to open a small bookstore in Algorta, along with Klodobike, an enthusiastic and vehement woman. The truth is that Sancho wants to be a crime fiction writer, but he never quite manages to imitate his much admired Hammet or Chandler, and the publishing houses systematically return his texts. One day, while throwing one of the many returned manuscripts from a cliff, he discovers that the only murder committed in Getxo before the war has not yet been solved. Sancho will then want to become a private detective, work on the case and discover who killed the Altube twins by chaining them together to a rock so that the rising tide would drown them. While he searches and interviews those involved in the case, he realizes that he is writing a real novel, with a new style, where he is both narrator and detective. He then comes to call himself Samuel Esparta, paying homage to Sam Spade.

Sólo un muerto más is a crime fiction novel that, with much humor, seeks to solve a case from the past. It is also a reflection on writing and on telling about reality. Ramiro Pinilla wishes to pay his personal homage to the crime fiction genre, which started him off as a writer and produced a few novels that he signed under pseudonym.

«Seen as a whole, Ramiro Pinilla’s narrative is a demonstration that great literature can be pleasant, fun, the greatest form of entertainment, a keystone in the construction and comprehension of our universe.»  Enrique Murillo, Babelia

Ramiro Pinilla was born in Bilbao in 1923. He won the Nadal Prize in 1960 and the National Prize of the Critics in 1961 with the novel Las ciegas hormigas (The Blind Ants), and was a finalist to the Planeta Prize in 1971 with Seno (Breast).  For almost three decades he voluntarily distanced himself from the publishing industry. During that time, Pinilla published his own works, such as En el tiempo de los tallos verdes (In the Age of Green Stems, 1969), Recuerda, oh recuerda (Remember, Oh Remember, 1974), Primeras historias de la Guerra interminable (The First Stories of the Never-ending War, 1977), La gran guerra de Doña Toda (The Great War of Mrs. Toda, 1978), Andanzas de Txiqui Baskardo (The Adventures of Txiqui Baskardo, 1980), Quince años (Fifteen Years, 1990), and Huesos (Bones, 1997). Pinilla returned to the publishing circuit with Verdes valles, Colinas rojas (Green Vallies, Red Hills), a trilogy made up of the novels La tierra convulsa (The Earth Trembles), Los cuerpos desnudos (Naked Bodies), and Las cenizas del hierro (Iron Ashes) that won the Euskadi Prize 2005, the National Critics Prize, and the National Prize for Narrative in 2006. That same year, Pinilla published La higuera (The Fig Tree), a novel about the Civil War, humiliation, and forgiveness that is currently being translated into several languages.