The Quais du Polar in Lyon, Europe's main crime fiction festival, focuses on creation in Spanish and the favorable time it is experiencing. Writers, experts, and editors analyze for EL PAÍS this explosion and some of the dangers inherent to success.

Since 2005 every year around this time, the very bourgeois city of Lyon is filled with criminal conspirators. Authors, editors, agents, journalists and, above all, readers, come together at the Quais du Polar, the main crime novel festival in Europe. In the streets, at presentations and among the public that gathers around the booksellers' tables, that special melody of the French language is always heard, together with the ever present English and, this year, Spanish.

“In Espagne, les conquistadors du polar à succès” (Spain, the conquerors of success), reads the cover of the weekly Le Point that can be picked up at the entrance to the Palais de la Bourse, the headquarters of the festival which this year has chosen Spain as guest country. It is a good moment to analyze the state of the genre and, above all, its possibilities of expansion abroad. How does it look from France’s point of view? Is the Spanish thriller the new European trend? Authors and experts from both countries respond.

El País/Blog-Cultura/Elemental (coordinated by Juan Carlos Galindo)