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NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. The ‘‘escape from literature’’ quotation alludes to Marjorie Nicolson’s 1929 essay, ‘‘The Professor and the Detective,’’ in which she argues that the detective story represents an ‘‘escape not from life, but from literature’’ (113). Nicolson decries and revolts against the then-popular ‘‘‘psychological novel’’’ (114) in favor of the detective story. 2. Indeed, in Susan Rowland’s recent and influential study of female British crime and detective writers, for example, Rowland calls the true subject of her book ‘‘pleasure.’’ Examining the work of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, P. D. James, and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, Rowland ‘‘concentrate[s] on the deeply literate embedding of readerly pleasures in these crime and detecting stories’’ (viii). 3. Porter’s use of ‘‘myth’’ draws on both Barthes’s now-famous formulation of the term and Richard Slotkin’s use of myth in his Gunfighter Nation as ‘‘a narrative formulation of a culture’s world view and self-concept, which draws both on the historical experience of that culture and on sources of feeling, fear and aspiration (individual and universal/archetypal) deep in the human subconscious and which can be shown to function in that culture as a prescription for historical action and for value judgment’’ (qtd. in Porter 120). 4. I should note that Max Martínez has written two crime novels, White Leg and Layover, but as crime novels, their central interest is in relating the story of the crime and the criminal, not the story of a detective and the resolution of a mystery.While that may seem like a hairsplitting distinction, it is one quite common in the corpus of detective criticism, and more importantly, the critical questions the crime novel raises are distinct from those of the detective novel.While Martínez, like other authors working in the crime novel form, including Paul Cain and Jim Thompson, is worthy of study on his own merits, an examination of his novels in this book would distract from the central arguments rather than enhance them. On a similar note, I will not be looking at Martin Limón’s three novels—Jade Lady Burning, Slicky Boys, and Buddha’s Money—not because of generic distinctions, but rather because the Army detective duo of George Sueño and Ernie Bascom do all of their work in South Korea. While their investigations are quite intriguing, the cultural, historical, and social conditions with which they deal hold no real pertinence for an investigation into post-nationalist Chicana/o identity as experienced in the United States. Moreover, George’s identification as a Mexican American is absent from the first novel, and when Limón draws on George’s ethnic identity in the subsequent novels, it feels, quite frankly, rather superficial and forced. Finally, the only Chicana/o detective novel I have opted not to analyze in this study is Ricardo Means Ybarra’s Brotherhood of Dolphins (1997). I have done so for two reasons. First, Brotherhood is a single-book detective novel, and it is a convention of detective criticism to direct one’s attention to series characters rather than one-off novels, as the genre often requires multiple appearances by the detective to develop a complex and compelling character and a coherent worldview . Second, and perhaps more importantly, the inclusion of this novel would add nothing substantive to my arguments about Chicana/o cultural identity, nor, by extension, does its exclusion detract from the comprehensive analysis I offer of the Chicana/o detective novel. 5. ‘‘Cultural citizenship’’ is a locution that Renato Rosaldo introduced in the late 1980s. For a full treatment of this concept, see William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor’s edited volume Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity , Space, and Rights. 6. Many fine books have already recounted the history of the Chicana/o Movement. For detailed accounts of that period, see, among others, Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America; Juan Gómez-Quiñonez’s Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940–1990; John C. Hammerback, Richard J. Jensen, and José Angel Gutiérrez’s A War of Words: Chicano Protest in the 1960s and 1970s; and Carlos Muñoz Jr.’s Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. 7. In Sisters in Crime, Maureen Reddy argues that the standard history that traces the origins and development of the crime novel, from Edgar Allan Poe to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the British Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s...