Content area
When a bartender chops a man's arm off in a bar fight, it rolls under a booth, and the man crawls after it to get his knife out of the severed hand and keep fighting (The Real Cool Killers 8)11; in other stories, a thief gets decapitated while fleeing on a motorcycle, a man walks into the street with a knife through his head; and a corpse with a slit throat gets driven through a produce market with its head flapping grotesquely out the back of the hearse. [...]he admits, a terrorist detective is not necessarily any better than a criminal: Notes 1 Himes's term. 2 Taibo's Mexican detective is Irish on his mother's side and Basque on his father's side; his father was also a terrorist on the side of Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War. 3Since Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares wrote the Don Isidro Parodi stories in the 1940s, many critics have supported the idea that the Latin American detective novel constitutes a parodical take on the "traditional" detective story, in the sense that it is understood as an appropriation of formal elements proper to existing nonLatin American models. 27"This social conscience acquired through practices emanating from an elemental, primitive humanism, from a strictly external evaluation of the situation, from a political consciousness constructed from the personal world of the detective, at least permitted him to perceive Mexico from a mordant perspective, from a critical position, from outside the realm of power and privilege."