Transatlantic Mysteries: Crime, Culture and Capital in the ‘Noir’ Novels of PacoIgnacio Taibo II and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán by William J. Nichols (review)

William Nichols’s Transatlantic Mysteries examines the emergence and consolidation of a new type of detective fiction in Mexico and Spain from the 1970s onward as a result of the efforts by two well-known representatives of the genre: the Spanish-Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and the Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Nichols’s study explores the formal resemblances of these authors’ novels, while also underscoring the similarities between the political and economic situations of Mexico and Spain during the aforementioned period (for instance, their similar transitions from agrarian to industrial societies and comparable recent histories of political repression). “Studying these two countries together,” asserts Nichols, “offers unique insight into the promises, flaws and failures of globalization in developing countries”. He thus seeks to contribute to existing studies of detective fiction in Mexico, Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries by providing a “transatlantic study” of the detective genre (14).

Throughout the four analytical chapters of his study, Nichols approaches a number of novels by Taibo and Vázquez Montalbán from diverse theoretical perspectives. These chapters are divided into two sections; one focusing on Taibo’s work, and the other on Vázquez Montalbán’s. In Chapter 2, Nichols draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the intellectual, defining Taibo and Vázquez Montalbán as intellectuals who operate consciously within the parameters of popular culture in order to criticize the neoliberal marketplace from the inside (50). He then goes on to discuss how both authors subvert specific cultural frames by juxtaposing cultural signifiers such as Che Guevara and Snoopy, in Taibo’s case, or by exploiting bourgeois discourses on gourmet cuisine, in the case of Vázquez Montalbán. Through these subversive operations, Taibo would “questio[n] the political role of popular culture to modify consciousness, offer ideological resistance, and instigate cultural revolution” (67). Vázquez Montalbán, on the other hand, through the figure of his well-known serial sleuth Pepe Carvalho would undertake an “iconoclastic crusade against the sentimentality of literature and the miseducation of culture” (87).

Chapter 3 provides an analysis of urban space in detective fiction, inspired by theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja and Néstor García Canclini. Here, Nichols asserts that the metropolis is more than just a spatial background in Taibo’s and Vázquez Montalbán’s novels and represents, in fact, a hybrid entity of physical and ideological spaces were the detective, alongside other marginalized groups, contests the right to self-representation and identity with those in power. Nichols convincingly locates evidence of this in literary motives such as the recurring graffiti slogans in Taibo’s work. These and other elements in the metropolitan scenery of Taibo’s and Vázquez Montalbán’s novels are thus approached as markers of both territorial and political battles.

In chapter 4 Nichols discusses the question of memory, drawing on the work of numerous theoreticians such as Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, Michel Foucault and Edward Said, among others. Nichols aims to show that in the work of Taibo and Vázquez Montalbán “the investigation and recuperation of memory, both individual and collective, offers a means for evaluating Mexico and Spain’s respective projects of modernization” (120-123). Additionally, Nichols considers that both writers successfully resurrect “the revolutionary ideals associated with the Leftist utopian social projects of the 1960s,” thus revitalizing “the relevance of the Left in the era of globalization” (123).

Chapter 5, entitled ‘Crimes Against Culture: Anti-Imperialism in Taibo and Vázquez Montalbán’, discusses the notion of anti-imperialism in relation to the problem of deciphering truth in Taibo’s detective novels and Vázquez Montalbán’s particularly cynical view of the mass media (153). Needless to say, the resolution of crime and mystery is a fundamental hermeneutical problem that has...