After his death, we remember Antonio Vera Ramírez, writer of more than a thousand novels of all genres
The Objective
By Hernán Migoya
9/6/2024
Lou Carrigan has died. For me, if not the best of the Spanish writers of Novels gender shorts in the twentieth century (Pedro Víctor Debrigode, José Mallorquí and Francisco González Ledesma are, it seems to me, authors of a stature difficult to reach), but he is probably the most vocational and militant of them all. As Corín Tellado, Antonio Vera Ramírez (Barcelona, 1934-2024) did not want to be anything other than what he was: a writer of popular novels.
I met him 15 years ago — no, the internet humiliates me by telling me that it's been almost 20 years — in a talk on this topic at the FNAC El Triangle in Barcelona, where I also had the opportunity to talk with other glorious figures of the Bolsilibros Bruguera such as the aforementioned González Ledesma, the amazing Juan Gallardo Muñoz (Curtis Garland) or (although the note does not indicate it, I would swear that they did) the delicious couple that hides behind the pseudonym of Ralph Barby: Rafael Barberán and Àngels Gimeno.
I was surprised by the bitterness of Silver Kane (González Ledesma) and to discover that what he really would have wanted was to be a serious author: he was, with and without a pseudonym. But, personally, the one I identified with the most was Antonio. In contrast to the tortured sophistication of González Ledesma, Antonio presented himself with a campechanía, energy and frankness with a rural aftertaste with which I felt very comfortable. We immediately hit it off and began to meet on subsequent dates to talk about almost everything human and its creative concerns. There I realized that, at more than seventy years old, he had not yet renounced any goal as a writer.
Faster than his gunslingers
Antonio was a commercial expert, and as a young man he
went to work in a bank, but the bug of fablecraft pulled him more and on top of
that it was profitable for him: at the end of the 50s he began to hit the
typewriter with such good fortune that immediately, specifically in 1962, he
was able to abandon the role of bank clerk and devote himself body and soul to
creating his newsstand novels that found so much popularity through publishers
such as Rollán, Bruguera, Producciones Editoriales, Petronio, Salvat or,
already in the death throes of the format, Ediciones B. Little joke: from his
strong fingers came More than a thousand works, full of an expeditious sense of
adventure, high doses of dynamism and a certain naivety, always playful and
almost connatural to the medium. Singularly successful was the saga dedicated
to his particular Modesty Blaise, the agent Brigitte Baby Montfort, which
reaches half a thousand... not of copies sold (the amount that today's young
authors usually sell), but of novels that are part of the series: a franchise
that would be all the rage especially in Brazil.
[One of the novels published by Lou in the Rollán publishing house.]
Of course, like everything popular in Spain, what Lou Carrigan (his most famous and immortal pen name) and others published under an Anglo-Saxon pseudonym was not considered culture and, despite its resounding success in sales, did not deserve a commiserative look from the specialized press or from "serious" writers. As a result, the passionate readers of such novels were left with absolutely nothing to know about those supposedly Yankee writers who followed with devotion and who, on many occasions, were neighbors on the stairs.
From 1969 to 1971, in just three years, Antonio saw seven of his novels adapted to film: León Klimovsky began with the war drama “It Doesn't Matter to Die”, with nothing less than Tab Hunter as the protagonist; omelette-westerns of all kinds followed, at the hands of good genre filmmakers such as Juan Bosch (“The Vultures Will Dig Your Grave”, “Stagecoach of the Condemned”. “And the Crows Will Dig Your Grave”) or others also of merit but already turned into virgins of the seventh art such as Ignacio F. Iquino (“The Band of the Three Chrysanthemums”, “A Colt for Four Candles”) and Manuel Esteba (“Twenty Paces to Death”).
With his boots on
For a few years, I had the privilege of cultivating the author's friendship. My partner and I enjoyed the honor of being received for a weekend in the "tower" that he owned with his lovely wife Pepita. Antonio (or Lou) was a person who took great care of himself and exercised regularly (I want to remember that he liked, in particular, the hammer throw). I suspect he considered himself a man who tried to live up to his manly heroes: a sort of Hemingway of escapist literature.
I think Lou considered me a staff for his longings to reign again in the bookstore displays. Unlike many of his colleagues in his youth, he never resigned himself to being only part of the past, of a "golden age" of the newsstand that would not return and whose revival, by force, only affected a residual portion of a nostalgic generation. He wanted to continue writing and publishing, to offer old characters and new adventures, or whatever the market demanded. But the format of the market was already different: popular novels were sold in bookstores and "disguised" as prestigious or transcendent literature. There was no place for authors of the book bag who did not know how to reinvent themselves and, due to generational distance, something like this was already very complicated. At most, I managed to vindicate him in the magazine Qué Leer with a report/interview that had what is perhaps the best photographic portrait that anyone has ever taken of him, the work of Raquel Calvo.
Among his later attempts to get me to help him with my editorial contacts, I vividly remember how he handed me an absolutely formal printed curriculum vitae, more typical of a technical professional than of a writer, where he highlighted as one of his most striking virtues his ability to type a very high number of keystrokes per minute. That is, the trait that he believed to be the most important to "sell" himself to modern publishers was how quickly he typed his literary fantasies. I felt overwhelmed by a mixture of tenderness and modesty: it was impossible for me to pass that document among trusted publishers and, on the few occasions that I was able to slip its name, I only received the greatest disinterest... something common in the publishing establishment (with worthy exceptions) with the whole phenomenon of the bookbag. Beyond occasional rescues for a niche audience by independent labels, attempts to generate a retro fashion from bookstores and large companies, such as Planeta with Silver Kane's Lady and the Memory (2010), have resulted in a notorious commercial failure.
[Lou Carrigan in a moving portrait of Raquel Calvo.]
Bite the dust, rookie!
In 2013 I moved to Peru, still focused on conveying my own work (and my own life), and I didn't hear from Antonio again for a long time. A couple or three years later, on a one-off visit to my family in Barcelona, I decided to call him to visit him or coordinate a meeting. For a few minutes Pepita answered the phone, affable and very kind, and although I was surprised by a certain nervousness in her voice, I attributed it to the surprise of my call that noon. Then it happened to me with Antonio: and, suddenly, I ran into a wall of tangible coldness. All my questions about how he was and how he was doing collided with monosyllables, a few brief yes or no that barred me from any natural reply in a cordial conversation. After a while, stunned by what seemed to me a veiled declaration of enmity, I asked if we could meet and catch up. His "no, I'm very good like this" was already the definitive barrier. Determined not to waste any more time, I said goodbye to him fondly and hung up.
The call left me trembling, it was a renunciation that I was no longer used to in the "civilized" Ciudad Condal and that referred me to the cazurra attitudes of my parents in the villages of El Bierzo, to that "I will never greet my cousin again" and other radical decisions that are taken in rustic environments and last a lifetime. That has also been the case in this case. I never knew where I had gone wrong. Perhaps he expected too much of me, that I would be his precarious supporter in today's publishing world; perhaps that I would maintain closer contact, even though I was the one who was starting from scratch on another continent.
I never knew the answer, but I always maintained a sincere affection for Antonio and the utmost respect for his high category as an author. About five years ago, the Hispano-American Cultural Association Friends of the Book Bag (A.C.H.A.B.) he asked me for a prologue for one of Lou Carrigan's valuable compilations that have been marketed in recent times, among other authors of popular novels. I wrote it selflessly, and after agreeing with them that, once it was finished, they would pass it on to Antonio himself so that he could decide whether or not to publish it. I imagine it was never published.
Antonio Vera Ramírez died on July 29, shortly after his 90th birthday. Among his latest feats is not only that of his remarkable longevity: he also made him bite the dust with ice tempera of a "young" writer who failed him at some important moment. Like one of his veteran gunmen teaching a lesson to the lechuguino who takes everything for granted.
Antonio is dead, but Lou Carrigan will never bite the
dust: thousands of shelves of surrendered admirers in Spain and Latin America
attest to this.
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