What’s in a Name?

Having recently read and enjoyed UK author Robert Wilson’s The Ignorance of Blood, his fourth and evidently final modern crime novel featuring Spanish Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón (a series that began with The Blind Man of Seville, one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2003), I confess to being ... well, a little jealous of blogger Julia Buckley’s new interview with the author. What a treat! I was particularly fond of this exchange:

I’m always interested in the naming of a detective, and yours, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, has the name of a bird of prey. In your latest novel you describe Falcón and his friend as “alive as hunting hawks.” Is a predator an apt metaphor for a homicide detective?

I chose the name because the intention of the books was to be all about ‘seeing’. That is: discovering the capacity to distinguish between the appearance and reality of both people and situations. The initial irony is that, of course, Falcón, and many of the other characters do not see things at all clearly. By the time he reaches the last book Falcón is as perceptive as he’ll ever be, and his friend, Yacoub, given his situation as a spy, perhaps even more so. A homicide detective is always trying to see the reality of things beyond the endless deception that is put before him. In Spanish the word for ‘falcon’ is in fact ‘halcón’, so the one audience that might miss the significance of this metaphor is the Spanish themselves.

You can read all of Buckley’s interview with Wilson here.