The Red Castle

How far would you go to win the hand of your love ? 

Would you be prepared to go all the way, to commit murder, for love ?  Inspector Lucas, still struggling to make sense of his emotions and the world around him, has to find out for himself how far he is prepared to go, if he is to find happiness.  He accidently meets a beautiful, but sad, lady during the 24 Hours of Le Mans car race.  Lucas struggles to understand the madness that is humanity, evinced by the race and football fans he meets, and struggles even more to judge the aristocratic Monsieur and the charming Madame Saint-Jean. 

But before Lucas can achieve this ecstasy, a terrible and bloody death shocks him and leaves him alone, wanted and hunted, with only € 4 in his pocket.  It is enough to put him on the trail of his most dangerous opponent so far, someone prepared to kill for money, ruthless and efficient.

If a killer-for-hire can be found by his customers, then he can also be found by the police, a problem no thriller-writer can resolve – but Lucas thinks he has found the secret.  He sets off on a tour of France to track down the Rucksack Cowboy that he believes is responsible for the murder, before the killer strikes again.  If Lucas succeeds, he can find true love.

León Melín is a poet who works in the medium of thrillers to better understand the great mysteries of life. 

Emotion and motivation can be conveyed in writing by description of the emotions and desires themselves, of the personal experience, but observers can only judge the actions of the sufferer.  A writer who is omniscient has no need to observe in order to understand a mystery: he can just invent.  Such simplifications just leave more questions unanswered.  It is only by searching, by hard work, by asking questions that someone can eventually reach some conclusion about true life.

Inspector Lucas is both an observer and an actor in the social drama that is 21^st century France, a drama that highlights the great dislocation between reality and recitation, between what people say they do, and what they actually do.  Lucas is the tool of the writer, hardly in control of his own destiny, but acted upon by the world he lives in.  He has no prior knowledge, no superhuman gifts, no great vision.  If he can bring to light some understanding of the world, it is through enough curiosity and stamina, a desperate need to know.

In The Green Castle, Lucas has to resolve a pointless crime, and tries to do so without causing more pain, more suffering.  In a battle between good and evil, evil always wins.  It is only in a refusal to fight that good can flourish.  In The Red Castle, Lucas is confronted by evil in its most malign and invisible form, the desire to do good.  In The Yellow Castle, the story takes the reader abroad to confront the greatest threat to humanity, the arrogance of the certain.

In all three stories, León Melín dwells on the personal, not the political.  They are songs of innocence, crying in loneliness in a wilderness of incomprehension, not a grandstand for social action.  That they are based on real incidents only heightens their importance as a record of human behaviour and an attempt at interpretation.  

I am a salesman.  I have been a salesman for more than 20 years.  I have been thrown out of banks in the City of London, and off stands in exhibitions in South Africa and Germany, but I have never been punched.  I was once mugged by an old man (really).  It is unthinkable in the animal world, that the male of a species can visit 50 countries and not be attacked, either by another animal who wants to eat him (ignore mosquitoes and bacteria and viruses and parasites) or by other males of the same species.  The only similarity is with domesticated animals, cats and dogs, as predators, and herbivores.  Which implies that man is a domesticated animal in the same way.

On the other hand, I have paid tax.  I have paid airport tax, VAT, income tax in four countries, parking charges, motorway and road and bridge tolls, religious contributions and solidarity taxes, charity contributions for the Red Cross.

I once saw a bombing run in the Bardenas Reales, a national park in Spain, used by NATO air forces to practice for missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.  I sat on a rock and watched, in the silence, totally alone.

I saw first a small flash, 10 km away across the desert, about as big as the flame on a cigarette lighter on the opposite side of a football stadium.  I wondered what it was.  It was followed a few seconds later by a tiny puff, like the smoker exhaling his first lungful of smoke.  It looked so peaceful.  More seconds passed.  “Brr-ra-ronn-crack”, no louder than that of a few sticks drying, warming up in the morning sun.  I still didn’t understand what was happening. 

Then, I heard a plane, overhead, very high, 10 000 metres.  And then I understood.  An Afghan village, its old men, the women, the children, a few goats, had been destroyed, wiped out, murdered.  Only a few boys with the main herd of livestock on the hill, and the mujaheddin, mobile, nervous, never in one place for long, would have survived.  This was paid for with my taxes. 

In 2002, I left Britain to avoid paying taxes to such a murderous regime.  But the more I thought about taxation, the more I realised that tax is inextricably linked to murder, to death, to human suffering.  At the same time, I discovered that tax was the basis for many of the world’s great fortunes, a precursor of economic empires as well as the destructor of declining dynasties.  The fascinating story of tax history has rarely been linked to the rest of the world’s history.

Many of the themes that are developed in the book are necessary in order to understand how tax systems work.  History is betrayed by dualism, the typical history of the victors, or the survivors.  Both have their psychological, maybe psychiatric, problems of interpretation.  But to provide a logical explanation of taxation requires the coverage of psychology.

Guilt is rarely managed in thrillers: murder in AgathaChristie stories happens with no more than a scream from an emotional woman.  The trauma is ignored, both physical and psychological, of the onlookers and the participants.   Hollywood focuses on the visibly-obvious suffering of the deceased, unable to communicate the actual emotions and feelings, the smell, the sounds.

I tried to kill a rabbit once.  I had seen my pencil-thin, 5’ great-aunt kill a rabbit, with a karate-chop to the back of the neck, something she had probably done all her life.  It looked simple enough.  When my dog trapped one with myxomatosis, I thought to put it out of its misery.  I hit it, hard.  Hit it again.  It just looked at me.  “Why are you doing this to me ?” its gummy eyes said.  “I am already suffering and you are making me suffer more.”  I tried kicking it.  In the end, I left it in the field dying miserably alone.  I believe that I felt worse than the rabbit, as many torturers, in psychotherapy, claim.