Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction
PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS BOOKS La imprenta enterrada. Arlt, Baroja y el imaginario anarquista. Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2000. Coeditor, Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Detective Fiction: Essays on the Género Negro Tradition. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. Translator, The Corpus Delicti. A Manual of Argentine Fictions. By Josefina Ludmer. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. JOURNAL ARTICLES Rosario Tijeras: Femme Fatale in Thrall. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos forthcoming 2008. Open Up a Few Corpses: Autopsied Cadavers in the Post-Boom. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 17.1 (2008). Muertos incómodos: The Monologic Polyphony of Subcomandante Marcos. Ciberletras 15 (2006), http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/. The Novela Negra in a Transatlantic Literary Economy. Iberoamericana 6.21 (2006): 115 31. Literature and Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina: The Anarchist Modernism of Roberto Arlt. Anarchist Studies 12.2 (2004): 124 46.
Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction A Transatlantic Discourse on Urban Violence Glen S. Close
CONTEMPORARY HISPANIC CRIME FICTION Copyright Glen S. Close, 2008. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60797-2 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-60353-4 ISBN 978-0-230-61463-5 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230614635 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: September 2008 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Transferred to Digital Printing in 2013
To Valerie and John
CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Preface: A Note on Translations xi 1 The Transatlantic Genesis of the Novela Negra 1 2 Mexico City 25 3 Bogota 57 4 Buenos Aires 93 5 Barcelona 141 Notes 181 Works Cited 209 Index 223
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The writing of this book was facilitated by several grants from the Graduate School Research Committee of the University of Wisconsin- Madison, and I thank the Graduate School and the Committee members for their generosity. I am also sincerely grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for providing me with such a supportive and amenable environment in which to teach and write. In devising and completing this project, I ve benefited especially from the collaboration of Guillermina De Ferrari, Kathryn Sanchez, and Ksenija Bilbija. Portions of Chapters 1 and 2 of this book originally appeared in Iberoamericana 6.21 and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 17.1 respectively, and I reproduce them here with the kind permission of the editors there. I am also indebted, as the reader will quickly appreciate, to many scholars whose work I cite in the pages that follow. I especially thank those critics and researchers of crime fiction on whose information and insights I have relied time and again. Jorge Lafforgue and Jorge B. Rivera, Patricia Hart, Amelia Simpson, José F. Colmeiro, Joan Ramon Resina, Ilan Stavans, Hubert Pöppel, Renée Craig-Odders, and Persephone Braham are among my most obvious creditors. I owe a more longstanding debt to the professors who taught me as much as I could learn about what is and is not done with literature, and for their enduring inspiration, I thank Josefina Ludmer, Roberto González Echevarría, Diana Sorensen, and Carlos Alonso. My deepest gratitude is to my parents Valerie and John, who took me to the library to get all the Three Investigators novels and without whose many sacrifices I would never have met those professors. Finally, this book would be much poorer were it not for the hours of love and labor Courtney Lanz contributed to it.
PREFACE: A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS In what follows, I quote from published English-language translations whenever available, but otherwise translations from Spanish-language sources are my own. Occasionally I will modify the text of a published translation by inserting bracketed material present in the original Spanish but omitted or inconveniently altered in the English version. In my bibliography, I provide references for both Spanish-language editions and cited English-language translations. In my text, I refer to novels primarily by their original Spanish titles, providing translations in parentheses. When the titles given in parentheses are italicized or in quotation marks, in accordance with MLA format, this indicates a reference to a published translation. When a translation of a title appears in parentheses without italics or quotation marks, it indicates that the title translation is my own and that all citations from that text will refer to the original Spanish edition.