New Directions in Hispanic Crime Fiction
Session Coordinator: Renée Craig-Odders
Department of Foreign Languages
University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point
Stevens Point, WI 54481
(715)346-2424
rcraigod@uwsp.edu

The Timely Demise of the Private Eye in Spain - Lorenzo Silva’s Bevilacqua Series

Thirty years ago, Julian Symons asserted that the detective story had “changed into the crime novel” (173). For reasons well documented in earlier studies of Spanish language detective fiction; most particularly it’s comparatively late emergence concurrent with the political and social liberalization beginning in the late 1960’s, the change to which Symons referred had not yet occurred in Spain.

Writers and critics have affirmed a renewed interest worldwide in what is now being called the géneronegro. One of the peculiarities of the género negro in Spain and Latin America is that it is gradually encompassing more subgenres and writers and no longer fits neatly into traditional categories.

Lorenzo Silva’s three Bevilacqua novels - El lejano país de los estanques (1998), El alquimista impaciente (2000) and La doncella y la niebla clearly evidence this generic crossover as well as other perculiarities of the new genero negro. This is important, as Symons notes, “because the aims of the detective story writer and the crime novelist are basically different.” (175).

This paper draws on Symons analysis and others in order to cast some light upon the evolving tradition of popular culture to which the Silva novels belong.

Renée Craig-Odders
University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point
rcraigod@uwsp.edu

‘Exiting the margins(?)’ A lesbian feminist reading of Javier Otaola’s Brocheta de Carne (2003)

Gillian Plain (2001:164) has commented that for the “hard-boiled” heterosexual female private investigator ‘[t]he tension between outsider and agency seems irresolvable’. She further contemplates whether ‘a lesbian policewoman [could] fare any better’ in inhabiting the dual polarised sites of belonging and marginality. This paper will offer a lesbian feminist reading of Javier Otaola’s novel Brocheta de Carne in which one of the key protagonists, Felicidad Olaizola, an inspector with the Basque police force, is responsible for investigating a series of gruesome homicides in Bilbao, where the female victims have been brutally raped and murdered. The reading will suggest that here the archetypal marginalized ‘other’ of the lesbian character succeeds in occupying, albeit temporarily, the position of subject. Further, it will argue that the character of Olaizola appears to offer certain resistance to Kristeva’s theory (1974) that women can only gain access to the agency of the symbolic order through identifying with the father and by denying themselves the pleasure and comfort of both the mother’s body and their own. The paper will conclude by proposing that Otaola’s lesbian inspector can indeed be seen to undermine the masculine hegemony traditionally associated with the role of the detective. However, it will be noted that such privilege is not permanent nor without its price.

Jacqueline Ann Collins
Northumbria University
jackie.collins@unn.ac.uk

The Search for Identity: Detective Fiction and the Mexican “Crack” Writers

Detective fiction is to postmodernism what myth is to the modernists, assert critics. The investigative, scientific approach to the quest for identity and truth embodied by the detective novel offers postmodernists a model that is simultaneously accessible and provocative, and which they can effectively evoke and then subvert. The genre has a natural appeal for the Mexican “Crack” writers, a group of young intellectuals who have called for an end to “banana fiction,” the whimsical fiction of those writers who, in Pedro Palou’s words, “imitated the <<boom>> writers ad nauseam and managed to reduce their literature to a mere formula.” While a key theme in their novels continues to be the search for identity – a theme central to Mexican literature – the “Crack” authors eschew the use of the mythical or magical and instead turn to rational inquiry as a means to recover an authentic history. I will show how Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla, the two leaders of the <<Crack>> group, use the conventions of classic detective fiction, especially as articulated by G.K. Chesterton and Jorge Luis Borges, in order to elevate the traditional Mexican theme of masks and identity from the national to the transcendent.

Marcie Paul
St. Norbert’s College
marcie.paul@snc.edu

Mapping Urban Violence

In this paper I will offer a broad overview of the contemporary Spanish American novela negra and examine mutations effected in investigative discourse during the last two decades by writers such as Colombians Santiago Gamboa and Mario Mendoza, Cubans Leonardo Padura Fuentes and Daniel Chavarría, and Argentines Juan Martini and Mempo Giardinelli. All of these writers adopt forms of dirty realism derived from the novela negra as they strive to narrate Latin America’s new ciudades duras beginning in the era of Latin America’s “lost decade” of the 1980s, when economic stagnation and the triumph of neoliberal economic policies brought fiscal austerity, massive social dislocation, and a subsequent explosion in crime rates in Mexico City, Bogotá, and elsewhere. I will compare this recent model of dirty urban social realism with the more traditional private-eye paradigm still retained by certain serial detective writers such as Mexican Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Chilean Ramón Díaz Eterovic, in order to show the limitations of this narrative model, which appears to be failing under the weight of contemporary Latin American urban social reality.

Glen S. Close
University of Wisconsin
gsclose@wisc.edu