Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction: A Transatlantic Discourse On Urban Violence (review)

In his broadly conceived and imaginative new study of crime fiction written in Spanish, Glen S. Close traces the novela negra genre as a literary phenomenon with roots in the transatlantic movement between the United States, Spanish America, and Spain (6). This movement of the genre and its subsequent subgenres, he suggests, is visible in the multidirectional travel of translations, pseudotranslations, pastiches, and imported editions as well as narrative topics, styles, and conventions across the Atlantic. Close focuses on Mexico City, Bogota, Buenos Aires, and Barcelona, arguing that contemporary Hispanic crime fiction locates criminal elements in these cities with an uncontrollable growth that has resulted in urban sprawl, division, and fragmentation are otherwise difficult to decipher. The conjunction of globalization, urbanization, and drug violence has caused critics to pose new questions about how a growing number of crime fiction writers wrestle with the problem of modern nations in crisis and the exigencies of popular narrative. Close's study contributes to the current scholarship on crime fiction by looking beyond national studies of crime fiction to analyze the "new urban violence" of the neoliberal era that makes distinctions among transatlantic representations of crime, especially between Spanish American and Spanish representations.

Following a similar line of inquiry as Persephone Braham's 2004 study of Cuban and Mexican detective fiction, Close convincingly establishes links in the transatlantic routes of translations, editions, and adaptations of crime fiction between Spain and Spanish America while also marking the historical and regional particularities that set apart the novela negra genre in these two regions. The main similarity between the genre in the two different regions, Close argues, is that the detective functions as translator of the intricate sprawling geography that characterizes modern-day urban cities. The detective thus aids in making the fragmented, urban mazes of the city more familiar to the reader, mapping out pockets of crime that span from destitute migrant neighborhoods to elite corporate and political offices (19).

The most impressive aspect of Close's study is his copious and encyclopedic explanation of numerous writers, publishing houses, literary markets, and narrative topics involved in the complex transatlantic movement of the novela negra genre from the late nineteenth century to the present. Additionally, he goes beyond an argument that merely looks at the way contemporary Hispanic fiction either fits or deviates from the ratiocinative classic detective novel or the U.S. hard-boiled formula to demonstrate how differences in urban crime in Spain and Spanish America result in ideological divergences that affect representations of crime in the multiple permutations of the novela negra. Close draws on both historical and sociological scholarship to explore the rise in crime and the global transformations in the neoliberal period as defining events in Spanish America over the past thirty years (23). For example, Close argues that the idea of the honest cop does not exist within the Argentine and Colombian context whereas the fewer number of violent crimes in Spain makes possible a public faith in police procedure reflected in the novela negra genre in Barcelona. While compared to Mexico City and Bogota Argentina's level of violence is similar to Barcelona's, the subtle and obvious references to Argentina's "dirty war" and dictatorships heavily implicates the government in all criminal activities. Yet, in cities such as Colombia and Mexico City, Close asserts that the focus most recently moves away from a political critique of state power to realismo sucio (dirty realism) that provides descriptions of urban spaces, poverty, drugs, violence, narcotrafficking, a decline in public security and escalated violence and that centers on the criminal rather than the detective (48–49).

Initially it may seem that Close's organization of his analysis, each chapter separated by the major urban spaces of Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Spain, could undermine the center of his argument that stresses the fluidity, flow, and reciprocal influence of the novela negra genre across the Atlantic. Close's brief discussions of...