Enrique Murillo, the editor who confessed (almost) everything

Enrique Murillo (Barcelona, ​​1944) is a living legend in Spanish publishing. Translator, author, journalist... but above all, editor, at places like Anagrama, no less than three major publishing groups (Bertelsmann, Planeta, and Santillana), and his own independent imprint (Libros del Lince). He has discovered—or promoted—authors such as Lucía Lijtmaer, Álvaro Pombo, Ray Loriga, Marina Perezagua, and Ignacio Martínez de Pisón. He has translated Nabokov, Amis, Barnes, Capote, Anaïs Nin, and Tom Wolfe. He has hung out with Salman Rushdie during the fatwa, launched bestsellers like Isabel Allende's Paula and José Luis de Vilallonga's The King . He has, in short, worked with so many major editors and authors that one could emulate that famous joke and say, "Who's that next to Murillo?" as if he were the Forrest Gump of the book world. Cultured, entertaining, and sharp-tongued, one of literary journalists' favorite pastimes is meeting with him to hear his stories, gossip, and insights into both the industry and literature. Now everyone can read them in his memoir, Personaje Segundo (Trama), a work of literary brilliance that aims to reveal, as its subtitle suggests, "the dark backroom of publishing."

Thanks to his friend Félix de Azúa, Murillo began reading manuscripts for Carlos Barral's publishing house. The play tells of his journey from there to head one of Spain's leading publishing houses, encompassing all the roles of the great publishing house.

The work reveals details of Ruiz Zafón's timid launch or Ana Rosa Quintana's plagiarism

Among the most striking aspects for the layman is his denunciation of how the book sales settlement system works. Authors receive a percentage of their work's sales, around 10%. But the information on how many books have been sold is provided by the publisher, the interested party, and not by an independent body. Murillo says that the 1987 Intellectual Property Law, which requires the development of a print run control system "which the legislator understood should be external and neutral," is not complied with in this regard. Among the gems, we see an editor who, upon hearing that a renowned international writer must be paid 2,000 pesetas for his sales, responds: "Leave it at half, XXX lives very well in London. He doesn't need it."

Or that, when the author of these memoirs took over as director of Plaza y Janés, he found himself faced with numerous folders containing lists of books, with ISBNs, author, title, and, next to each one, two figures, one indicating actual sales and the other indicating the (lower) reported sales, a practice he banished with the support of his management. Or that Javier Marías's departure from Anagrama was due to a discrepancy of some 8,000 copies between what he believed he had sold and what his editors had declared. "Agent Carmen Balcells," he notes, "steered clear of this suspicion from the very beginning: setting such a high advance that it no longer mattered what sales the editor declared; she and the author had already received it in advance."

He tells us about the (laborious and almost aborted) launch of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind —which he obtained, thanks to Terenci Moix, when it was submitted for the Fernando Lara Prize, which he didn't win—to Ana Rosa Quintana's "shameful" plagiarism in her novel, which curiously served to catapult her even further to fame. Murillo interweaves cases with his own personal affairs, such as his happy years in London, his problems obtaining custody of his children, and the illness of his painter wife. The business dealings of Jorge Herralde's father, an industrialist associated with a German protected by Franco's regime, also appear. "I emphasize the merit of the rebellious son in fleeing that company and setting up a left-wing publishing house with part of the inheritance," he notes.

Murillo appears advising the publication of A Confederacy of Dunces or hiring authors such as Imre Kertész, Herta Müller or Jonathan Franzen, but also putting his foot in it (or maybe not, who knows) by advising against Patricia Highsmith, not saying anything about Arturo Pérez-Reverte or stating that he doesn't like Manuel Vázquez Montalbán or Juan Goytisolo.

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He was a key figure in what became known as the new Spanish narrative, starting in the 1980s: "I invented that myself."

With a chronicle of the precarious working conditions in the sector as a backdrop, he also compares the custom of firing an editor for a label's poor sales to football teams that dismiss a coach for poor results, even if their work is good. He gives the example of Mario Muchnik. "The senior executive who fired him from Seix Barral believed that everything bad was due to that editor with refined tastes. And, after having dismissed him in a rude manner, he proceeded to do things like cancel the contracts of an author who sold very little, but whose next work sold hundreds of thousands of copies, a certain Milan Kundera. He also canceled the contract for another of Muchnik's "whimsies," the novel titled "Belle du Monde," which Anagrama successfully published shortly afterward." On the other hand, he cites the positive example of Herralde, who supported authors with poor commercial results for many years until they managed to write a bestseller , such as Antonio Tabucchi and his "Sostiene Pereira."

Murillo also established a personal canon of authors and trends. Contrary to the avant-garde, the nouveau romance, costumbrismo, the political novel, and the current Spanish crime novel (he calls it gray)... he was a key figure in what became known as the new Spanish narrative, beginning in the 1980s. "I invented that," he laughs, amused.