Alejandro G. Roemmers, writer: “José Luis Moreno scammed me, it’s all recorded, one day he’ll be convicted.”

“That murder made me very curious. There are very few Stradivarius in the world—I'd say there isn't a single one in Argentina—and yet, a man owned several of these violins in a place in the middle of nowhere. I decided to recreate that mystery and do so through the story of a violin, the most valuable, the last one made by the great Antonio Stradivari in 1737, shortly before his death at the age of 93,” Roemmers said in an interview with La Vanguardia during a visit to the city of Cremona, the birthplace of the Italian luthier.

Roemmers is a poet by vocation, but in 2008 he launched into fiction with The Return of the Young Prince (Planeta), which was a bestseller. He later wrote a detective novel, Morir lo necesario (To Die the Necessary) , about events he experienced firsthand. “Now, I've decided to deploy all my literary resources to create a novel that is both historical and detective-like, and that is articulated through the story of this violin, which passes from hand to hand from the day it was made until the moment of the mysterious death of a man and his daughter in Paraguay.”

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The result is The Mystery of the Last Stradivarius (Planeta), an entertaining novel that travels between the investigations of Detective Tobosa and his assistant Gutiérrez at the Asunción police station and the Nazi concentration camp La Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste. “I wanted to imagine how the violin could have gotten to Paraguay. Since I was writing during the pandemic, I included the plague years in Naples. I also included the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo in 2014 because World War I was a tremendous conflict,” explains the writer.

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Roemmers' violin also travels through Mussolini's Italy until it is lost in that Nazi concentration camp, only to reappear in Nueva Germania, a community that a group of Germans led by Bernhard Förster and his wife Elisabeth Nietzsche, the philosopher's sister, created at the end of the 19th century in the interior of Paraguay to practice their anti-Semitism and which later became nourished by Nazis who escaped justice. History and intrigue go hand in hand in The Mystery of the Last Stradivarius, whose author also lived through some episodes in the novel in real life.

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Alejandro's grandfather, of German origin, founded Laboratorio Roemmers in Argentina in 1921, a pharmaceutical company that made his heirs one of the country's largest fortunes. The writer recounts that, despite his millions, he suffered "a crisis between the ages of 18 and 23" and had a dispute with his father, Alberto, son of the pharmaceutical company's founder: "It was difficult, but from the age of 30 I felt better, I began to really enjoy life, and at 42 I wrote The Return of the Young Prince, which is a book about how to live fully."

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That rediscovery of life led him to philanthropy and to a friendship with the recently deceased Pope Francis. However, Roemmers has been involved in several lawsuits, the most notorious being with the Spanish audiovisual entrepreneur José Luis Moreno. “Only two people have said nonsense about me. One is this Spanish con man who was recorded by the Civil Guard for a year, José Luis Moreno. Justice is slow, but everything is recorded, and one day he will be convicted,” he says.

And he adds, "It's perfectly clear how he swindled me and how much money he swindled from me. All I wanted was to make a series about Saint Francis of Assisi. Moreno came to help me, and in reality, he diverted all the funds I gave him for something else," he concludes.