Translation Rights TQE / Janis Joplin’s Lover

It was an enormous pleasure to publish this novel in Spain after the Mexican edition turned out to be a great surprise, due to its unique narration and for being, as the writer Federico Campbell put it, «the first story that truthfully gathers the effects of the drug underworld culture upon our country».

Ever since David Valenzuela, a foolish young man, kills one of the Castro boys, known dealers of the Triángulo Dorado in the Sinaloa region, in self-defence, his life turns into a flight full of lucky breaks where he will meet very different characters which, without his

realizing it, will make him become involved in both tragic and comic situations. In Culliacán, the first stop of his pilgrimage, he will come into contact with the guerrilla through his cousin El Chato, he will be a witness to the dark power of the judicial police, he will

travel to Los Angeles with the baseball team trained by his uncle, where they will nearly sign him on to the Dodgers, and where he will fall in love with Janis Joplin after an odd encounter, as well as strengthen his friendship with El Cholo, a humble but ambitious small-time dealer… From that moment on, he will lose control over his own his life, and have to overcome all types of obstacles due to his obsession with seeing Janis again.

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.”