Joël Dicker: “Today’s world cultivates jealousy and envy”

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The writer suizo Joel Dicker (Geneva, 1985) rose to fame in 2012 with ‘The truth about the Harry Quebert case’: sold 15 million books in 42 languages ​​and won prizes such as the Goncourt des Lycéens and the French Academy Novel. A publishing phenomenon, the first crime novel in a trilogy starring a writer, Marcus Goldman, and set in New Hampshire, which now closes with ‘The Case of Alaska Sanders’ (Alfaguara / The Bell). In it he faces the murder of a young model with a note in her pocket that reads: ‘I know what you’ve done’. It takes place chronologically after the first title and before the third, the youth drama ‘The Baltimore Book’which he published in 2016 and was followed by novels such as ‘The disappearance of Stephanie Mailer’ o ‘The riddle of room 622’.

It returns with ‘Dicker brand’ elements such as intertwining time lines and characters who want to free themselves from their past. Are we prisoners of it?

No, we cannot give up our past. We must accept it. That is the challenge: to be able to live with it and continue building ourselves despite the difficult moments we have experienced or what we have not done.

Does Joël Dicker have a past to which he would like to return or from which he would like to flee?

From which you want to run away, no, but there is a nostalgic past that you want to return to when you remember good times. But what’s done is done, and nostalgia is always a somewhat false view of the past because it’s a past relived but always improved. Nothing is better than moving on.

His character of Marcus speaks of the loneliness of the writer. Have you felt like him?

No, because writing fills me. It is its strength and its beauty. Like reading a book: it is a solitary act, but you feel very alive because you are surrounded by characters.

Has the pandemic confirmed to us that we don’t know how to be alone?

We don’t know how to be alone. We are in a world where we need to be surrounded, constantly communicating and sharing things on the networks, needing others to validate us with ‘likes’… When we go to the restaurant with other people, the first thing we do is put the mobile on the table. What are we afraid of missing out on? We have lost the ability to concentrate.

It is elitist and snobbish to think that a book that many like is bad


His Twitter account has been silent for about a year.

I think I’m going to close it. I’m not very fond of Twitter, I’m more of Instagram, where people are usually nice. Twitter is a place for hate and conflict and I don’t need conflict. There is already enough in real life.

This week, the Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa disparaged the black genre in an article.

I have not read it and prefer not to comment. But I am wary of those who do not respect the tastes of others. The crime novel is the genre that is most liked and offers the most freedom, it allows exploring all human themes well and including other genres. It is an extraordinary creative format where research is the trigger that leads us to continue reading. To those who despise crime novels, I would tell them to try writing one, to see if it’s that easy.

In my novels the crimes can be understood


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What would you say to those who associate best sellers with lower quality?

That is a very European thing. In the United States if a book sells, it means that many people like it and therefore it means that it is good. It is strange, elitist and snobbish to think that what many people like is bad. Some critics think this way, feeding the myth that reading is boring and inaccessible and thus push people towards television series.

You do not affect the investigation itself as much as the motivations for the crimes.

In my books it is known that the murders have been committed by someone from the environment, who is not an unknown psychopath. They are crimes that occur for reasons that we can understand, which does not mean that we justify them. I am interested in understanding and knowing what drives someone to kill.

Nostalgia is a false view of the past because it is a past relived but always improved.


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Have you met a murderer or a policeman…?

No. I prefer to help myself with my imagination. I like to invent. If I informed myself too much, I think the novel would lose its charm. Because reality is the enemy of fiction. It is a novel, not an essay.

It is always said that reality is stranger than fiction.

Yes, but fiction is harder to believe. If we read the events in a newspaper they are usually sordid stories that we would not want to read in a novel or they are so incredible that if we read them in a novel we would say that they are impossible. That is why I am not inspired by real cases.

He continues to play with meta-literature, as in ‘The Enigma of Room 622’. Characters who are writers and that the reader identifies with you but you assure that they are not your ‘alter ego’.

These writers allow me to pose questions that I ask myself: what is a writer? who is a writer? We do not know. It is not something for which you need a title or a diploma that legitimizes you before others. For a while I was worried about that, because people only considered me a writer since I was successful, but before that I had already written a lot.

Is there a secret to success?

No. If there was a recipe, all writers, publishers and booksellers would apply it.

Fame, success, money… and envy are the order of the day.

We are in a world that cultivates jealousy and envy. People want to provoke them on the networks and Instagram, posting photos where they are handsome, everything is going well for them, their partner and children are wonderful, they have no financial problems… but it is not reality. We know, but it bothers me that it is so. In all the promotion of the novel I have signed many books and 90% of people ask me for photos with them to make their friends jealous. What strange behavior! You used to take a picture of yourself as a souvenir of the important moments in life. Now they are an instrument to generate envy.

To those who despise black novels, I would tell them to try writing one, to see if it is that easy.


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What do you think it gives them?

They live in the reality bubble of others because they think it is prettier than their own. We know that everyone has problems, that life has lights and shadows, but we want to believe that if others are happy in their bubbles, we can also have them, and that will leave us free from worries, anguish, illness…

Success came at the age of 25. Marcus thinks about going back to his pre-fame self. People think that helps to be happy.

Fame does not make you happier if we understand happiness as what makes you feel comfortable with yourself, respect yourself and accept who you are and the life you lead; love and be loved. That totally excludes success, money, recognition, Instagram… The question Marcus asks himself is what happens when you look at yourself naked in the mirror every morning, without the celebrity suit?

Marcus’s agent only hopes to make more money by selling the movie rights to his novel. Reflection of his reality?

Not necessarily from my novels. But I wonder what happens to the money in certain movies or series that have very poor quality. For example, ‘Fast & Furious’. They’ve been 1,2,3,4, 8… I’ve lost count. They have budgets of 100 or 200 million dollars and another 100 for marketing. Couldn’t better movies be made or spend the money on something else? As readers, viewers, citizens… we have the responsibility to be demanding with quality.

After the death in 2018 of his editor and mentor, Bernard Fallois, who launched him to fame, whom he paid tribute to in ‘The Enigma of Room 622’, he has created his own publishing house, Rosie & Wolfe.

Bernard said in his will that after his death the publishing house should close. He embodied her, she was small and independent, and she believed that without him it would get worse and worse or she would end up being bought by a large group. He didn’t want that. And I thought that looking for another editor would be like betraying him, so I founded a publishing house to continue being involved in the whole process of my books.

‘The Alaska Sanders case’https://www.lne.es/”The Alaska Sanders case’

Joël Dicker

Publishers: Alfaguara / The Bell

Translations: Maria Teresa Gallego and Amaya Garcia / Josep Alemany

592 p. €23.90

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