Weaving Webs of Intrigue: Classical Mythology and Analytic Crime Fiction in Rubem Fonseca’s A grande arte

This study focuses on some of the classical features of Rubem Fonseca’s A grande arte (1983) in order to emphasize the puzzle-solving tradition of the detective novel that is embedded within Fonseca’s crime thriller, producing a work that does not entirely fit into traditional divisions of detective, hardboiled, or crime fiction. For this reason, it might be called analytic “crime” fiction instead of the purely intellectual analytic “detective” fiction because it weaves social commentary into the literary model detective fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges. While pure crime fiction generally goes beyond mere detective work to take us into the minds of the criminals themselves, Fonseca’s A grande arte not only blurs the distinctions among conventional genres of detective fiction but also exposes the interaction between the formal, legal economy, and the illegal activities of the economic underworld through its use of classical references and cultural allusions.