Literatura policial y policía: reflexiones a partir de dos intervenciones críticas (José Pablo Feinmann y Carlos Gamerro)

I propose a close reading on two critical interventions about crime fiction in Argentina: “Estado policial y novela negra argentina” (1991) by José Pablo Feinmann and “Para una reformulación del género policial argentino” (2006) by Carlos Gamerro. Beyond the time difference between the two, I observe aspects in common. Both texts elaborate a corpus of writers and fictions; propose an interpretative guide between the literary and the political-social series; maintain a specific interest in the relationship between crime fiction and police; and elaborate figures of enunciators who serve both as theorists of the genre and as writers of fiction. Among these four dimensions, the one that particularly interests me here is the third, since it allows me to investigate the link that is assumed between “detective fiction” and “police institution”. My conclusion is twofold: on the one hand, in both essays predominates a reductionist vision of the genre, since a kind of necessity is emphasized in the representation of the social order; on the other, its main objective seems to lie in intervening directly on the definitions of the detective fiction in Argentina (and, on this point, both texts acquire an undoubtedly prescriptive nuance).

Historiographic Metafiction and the Metaphysical Detective in Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet

Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet explores the writing of history as an attempt to construct a narrative from a multitude of unreliable and conflicting sources. As a result, any attempt at historiography is also plagued by the problems of representation found in literature. More particularly, not unlike detective fiction, history is concerned with identifying the inspirations and actions of its players and with revealing the truth about an episode or series of episodes, using historical information, all of which may or may not be reliable. By examining the relationship between the historical and the fictional in Amulet this paper will discuss Bolaño’s use of the tropes of metaphysical detective fiction and how they help foreground the difficulties posed by historical facts by reinventing them in fiction. This will, in turn, highlight the intersection between detective fiction and historiographic metafiction and how by combining these two genres writers can reimagine historical contexts and find new meanings and significance.

Text Fragmentation in the novel “Troubled Blood” by Robert Galbraith

The article examines specifics of fragmentation in contemporary works of fiction. Identifying elements that connect heterogeneous episodes or fragments can reshape readers’ experience and serve as a key for interpretation. The analysis of the detective novel “Troubled Blood” by R. Galbraith has demonstrated that fragmentation is realized at different text levels and in different compositional and stylistic forms, namely, within the categories of temporality and locality, in the development of plot lines, within the categories of description and reasoning, in dialogues, polylogues, internal monologues. The category of intertextuality plays a special role in the fragmentation of the novel under study. Non-linear narrative, intended lack of chronological and psychological sequence serve to effectively introduce the main focus of detective fiction – suspense and puzzle-solving; these literary devices also contribute to its unique narrative perspective.

Neo-Victorian felony – Crime narratives in Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project and Ian McGuire’s The North Water

The neo-Victorian novel has been one of the most significant branches of contemporary British historical fiction for the past three decades. Thanks to works like A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Sarah Waters’ trilogy Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, the genre has gained not only considerable popularity among readers, but also almost a canonical literary status. Although recent neo-Victorian fiction has been trying to find some new ways in which the genre could avoid stereotypical narratives, it still retains its most determining idiosyncrasies. One of them is an interest in the undersides of Victorian society, including the themes of violence and criminality, which is why these novels often resort to the genre of crime and detective fiction. This is also the case of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2015) and Ian McGuire’s The North Water (2016), both historical novels set in Victorian Britain which were, respectively, shortlisted and longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. This paper attempts to show the different manners in which these two novels employ various forms of crime narratives so as to achieve their goal of presenting convincing and seemingly authentic insights into the more obscure aspects of the Victorian era.

Disco Elysium as Gothic fiction

Disco Elysium demonstrates many hallmarks of the Gothic through its storyline and representational elements, particularly its emphasis on the instability of its protagonist, the sense of decline and decay conveyed through its setting, and the interconnected secret histories that are revealed through exploration. Furthermore, many of the game’s stylistic and ludic features, such as its dense description and emotive language, and its overwhelming array of options, interactions, and responses, can be understood as engagements with the uncanny and disorienting excess of the Gothic tradition. These Gothic elements manifest most frequently through the game’s attempt to represent psychological complexity within its role playing system, its depictions of urban spaces, and its approach to questions of unresolved memory and history. The presence of these Gothic features in Disco Elysium work to contest the game’s categorisation as a ‘detective role playing game.’ While the genres are closely connected, detective fiction typically follows a trajectory in which the history of the central mystery becomes progressively clearer through the accumulation of information and detail, whereas the Gothic traditionally seeks to maintain and heighten a sense of disorientation. Exploring the tension between Disco Elysium’s Gothic elements and its status as a detective game allows for a richer appreciation of the political and social commentary that emerges from both its narrative and gameplay.

Introduction: Stories of Science and Empire

In this introduction, Taylor-Pirie appraises the intersections of the ‘imaginative architecture of science and empire’ by examining how, as a fledging medical discipline at the fin de siècle, parasitology entered into significant encounters and exchanges with the literary and historical imagination. Introducing readers to Nobel Prize–winning parasitologist Ronald Ross (1857–1932), Taylor-Pirie lays the foundations for the rest of the book by examining how forms such as poetry and biography, genres such as imperial romance and detective fiction, and modes such as adventure and the Gothic together informed how tropical diseases, their parasites, and their vectors were understood in relation to race, gender, and nation. In addition to considering the contemporaneous public understanding of science, she also explores how parasitologists were often engaged in writing their own histories of the discipline, a practice that led to a predominantly white, predominantly male understanding of science that finds a legacy in gender disparities in STEM and biases in popular histories of medicine in favour of a mode of ‘heroic biography’. She provides a brief critical overview of the field of literature and science and places her methodology and the field in the context of contemporary topics like the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and the heritage culture wars.

Sequel Reminders

The fifth chapter switches to a different, structural issue: that of sequels, which have always appealed to authors of detective fiction. What does returning to an inaugural character require to revive interest in fresh adventures? In turn, how might a single sequel become a larger series, transforming the second novel into a succession of more or less ordered books that avoid simply starting over again, each as if anew? What instead does it take to weave together an enriched, intertwined history for a central detective, even one initially imagined as relatively two-dimensional? Exploring how subsequent novels cement reader loyalty by either addressing or sidestepping earlier episodes, this chapter looks at the stylistic stitching needed to integrate back-stories with more recent episodes. And it takes up the idiosyncratic strategies authors select to fuse memories and flashbacks together with psychological patterns, shaping the sum of individual parts into a more unified portrait.

Prologue

This introduction discusses genre fiction as a narrative structure that relies on familiar conventions, with particularly stark premises informing the mystery or noir genre. It anticipates the following chapters, which avoid historicist or sociological speculations about the rise of a readership for detective fiction, offering instead a variety of formal explanations for the genre’s continuing appeal. These are mostly stylistic stratagems shared by early hard-boiled writers, then elaborately cultivated in noir films, which seem at first to pale next to the often preposterous violence that drives the plots. But those formal maneuvers attest to a need for diversion, for misdirection and delay, that absorbs attention by swaying it from plot alone. Discussion then shifts to a review of each of the chapters to follow.