Popular Female Spanish Writer Revealed to be Three Men

Agustín Martínez, Jorge Díaz, and Antonio Mercero accept the Planeta Literary Prize. (Getty Images)

Carmen Mola, the name of a Spanish author known for her violent crime novels, was revealed to be the pseudonym for three men when they took home Spain’s prestigious Planeta literary prize on October 15. The authors accepted the €1,000,000 ($1,200,000) reward, the largest literary prize in the world, for their unpublished work The Beast.

The men, Agustín Martínez, Jorge Díaz, and Antonio Mercero, work as television screenwriters and have published books under their real names. The authors first gained notoriety in 2018 under the pseudonym Mola for their hit-crime series centered around the character of Detective Elena Blanco.

Given that women spearheaded the publishing industry, critics have suggested that the trio chose a female pseudonym to appeal to a wider, female market. After all, not only do women purchase more books on average than men in most categories of fiction, but last year, they also wrote 629 of the 1,000 bestselling fiction titles. 

The authors, however, claim that the pseudonym’s effect was unintentional. “I don’t know whether a female pseudonym sells better than a male one, I haven’t the faintest idea, but it doesn’t look that way to me,” Mercero said. He added, “We didn’t hide behind a woman, just behind a name.”

Spanish media organizations have pointed out the contrast between the supposed life of Mola and the gruesome violence of “her” books. Spanish newspaper El País noted that Mola had “been marketed as a university professor in her forties and a mother of three who wrote fiction in her spare time and preferred to remain anonymous,” while El Mundo observed, “It hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the idea of a university professor and mother of three, who taught algebra classes in the morning then wrote ultra-violent, macabre novels in scraps of free time in the afternoon, made for a great marketing operation.”

The unmasking of the three male authors has also raised questions about the representation of violence against women in literature and film. Erica Wagner of the Financial Times said “crime fiction… so often takes as its subject violence against women—almost always perpetrated by a man—and is often criticized for dwelling on this too graphically.” She added, “There is something queasy in the idea that a female pseudonym offers shelter to men writing of murder and mayhem.”

The book that won the Planeta literary prize, The Beast, follows a journalist, a policeman, and a young woman who hunt down a serial killer who preys on girls during a cholera epidemic in 1834. The book will be released in November alongside the next installment of the Elena Blanco series.