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The birth of the detective genre in the early nineteenth century was propitiated by the modern discourses of classification, empiricism and order; the new sciences of sociology, psychology and forensic medicine; and industrial capitalism. The defining element of the Hispanic detective genre, especially in the post-1968 neopoliciaco, is its concern with the failure of the liberal project embodied in these Enlightenment paradigms. Doubly marginalied, Latin American detective fiction is a response to problems of Latin American modernity, modernism, and postmodernity. Detective writers Leonardo Padura Fuentes and Paco Ignacio Taibo II take up the problem on both ideological and aesthetic terms: Padura as a way of confronting the apparently irreconcilable aspects of premodernity and postmodernity in the Cuban predicament, and Taibo in an attempt to redefine the terms of nationalism by subverting the cultural, political and economic discourses of modernity that have ravaged Mexican society. In the aesthetic realm, Taibo and Padura reach beyond the boundaries of genre and nation, using a variety of techniques--intertextuality, parody, pastiche--to interrogate their modernity.
The autochthonous detective novel appeared in Mexico and Cuba at approximately the same chronological moment, but under quite different political circumstances. The socialist crime novel was introduced by the Cuban government in 1971 for propaganda purposes. Chapter 3, focusing on works by Padura, Luis Rogelio Nogueras, Justo Vasco and Rodolfo Perez Valero, analyzes the role of gender in the construction of revolutionary metaphors. Recent events have contributed to a reevaluation of the genre and its transformation into a more critical form of expression. In contrast with Cuba, 1969 marked a moment of severe disillusinment with the ideals of the Revolution in Mexico, following the massacre at the Plaza de Tres Culturas. Chapter 4 examines the roles of violence and nationalism in the Mexican detective novel, focusing on Rafael Bernal's El Complot Mongol (the first example of the "new" crime novel), Jorge Ibarguengoitia's Las muertas, and Taibo's Hector Belascoaran Shayne novels.