Toni Hill: A constant challenge to inertia

"I think I am someone eminently scattered who always liked to read. I did many different jobs until I realized that the constant in my life was the love for reading, the world of books." It was 1999 and Toni Hill Gumbao decided to leave a stable and well-paid job for others, and move to Sitges to venture, as a freelance, into the publishing world. "Since then, I've been self-employed," he explains, taking the first sips of his Estrella Daura and accepting that the radio remains on, "as long as the selection is varied and that horrible elevator music à la Enya, Kenny G or Michael Bolton never plays."

When Toni Hill made this momentous decision, it was still a decade before he would debut as an acclaimed writer with El Verano de los Juguetes Muertos (The Summer of Dead Toys), the first volume of the Inspector Salgado police trilogy which he took advantage of to start "at a time when I had just been paid very well for a translation and had some margin to try to write something myself," and which, more than a success, would end up being a bombshell upon its release in bookstores in 2011.

"I was very lucky ---he argues--- because even before the book was released here in Spain, the publisher took the manuscript to the Turin Book Fair and translation rights were sold there for several countries, which eventually ended up being nineteen." That was another moment of change for this writer born in 1966 "by chance in Barcelona, because I have rarely lived inside the city": "When I understood that what I wanted and could do was write, a lot of things professionally fell into place for me."

Propensity for Change

"Writing Los Ángeles de Hielo (The Ice Angels), a gothic work, and closing the Salgado series was, for me, another turning point, because it allowed me not to pigeonhole myself into a single genre and to break out of routine." Towards this latter concept, the writer Toni Hill feels a special aversion and claims to live in the constant contradiction between being very organized and wishing to escape all forms of monotony.

--- In a way, your literary career is about that, about not getting stuck and daring to do different things.

--- Yes, I am proud to have dared to do what I like at all times.

If one has to look for a constant in his work, marked by a systematic challenge to inertia, perhaps it is that his works always feature characters with a certain intelligence and charisma. "I'm not interested in writing about someone who isn't intelligent," he confirms.

--- And what will be next?

Here, Toni Hill takes a long swig of his beer and, apart from his conspicuous work as a literary translator, assures that he is decompressing after the three years it took him to complete his latest work, the recent El Oscuro Adiós de Teresa Lanza. "Also, I'm at a crossroads between two projects that attract me equally and I don't know which one to decide on." Then, he smiles with his very characteristic cunning and adds: "The truth is that I like imagining stories much more than having to write them later. If I could, instead of books, I would sell plots!"

A city lived from its margins

"An Argentine friend of mine, who lives near the Palau de la Música, would find groups of Japanese tourists every night photographing the door of his building, which is perfectly normal and without any special architectural features. In the end, fed up with the flashes blinding him every time he went down to take out the trash, he asked and found out that some Japanese tour guide had marked his house as the one inhabited by the famous Vampira del Raval, Enriqueta Martí, who actually lived on what is today Joaquím Costa street."

Toni likes the Barcelona in whose margins he has always lived, that city "for which, as a child, on the occasion of Sunday visits, they would dress me in walking clothes" and which he finds "relatively friendly" for a large city. But of course, tourism. "In recent years it has lost its own personality and I notice a certain point of subservience to the visitor that I believe, by character, does not correspond to us."

Barcelona seems "relatively friendly" to him for a large city

The conversation continues at the bar, moving from one topic to another: the city pigeons, the lukewarm subversion of the Gauche Divine, living with many moves under one's belt, the scarce attachment to objects, meat "which I eat little of and if I order it, it has to be very well done"...

--- Hey, and since we're on the subject, do you want to eat something?

--- Well, some tapas, so I can vary and, since I'm eating out, I feel like snacking.