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.