Transatlantic Mysteries: Crime, Culture, and Capital in the “Noir Novels” of Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (review)

William J. Nichols’s book offers a compelling argument about the novela negra in the Atlantic space: that the genre applies the 1920s sense of disillusionment first reflected in the North American hard-boiled tradition of detective fiction to neoliberalism’s uneven imposition of globalization on Mexico and Spain after 1968. Focusing on the works of two of the most prolific producers of the genre in these countries, Nichols argues that the popular novels of Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán adopt and parody the primary tropes of the North American tradition in order to “examine the revolutionary possibilities of literature and popular culture,” offering “a new kind of Marxist project that revitalizes the left by redefining the role of socially engaged literature in a globalized landscape” (15). He addresses this topic through a variety of critical lenses that include Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of ideology, Mary Louise Pratt’s concepts of desmodernización and desglobalización, Edward Soja’s concept of third-space in an urban setting, Hayden White’s dismantling of historical discourse, and Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory. Framing each of the five chapters with one of these critical approaches, the author produces a constellation of analyses that together flesh out the many ways in which the noir novel critiques globalization in Mexico and Spain.

The introduction lays out the basic argument of the book and provides ample bibliographical references to situate the author’s analysis vis-à-vis other critical approaches to the detective genre in Spanish and Spanish American literature. Chapter one provides basic historical background on post-1968 Mexico and post-Franco Spain, showing how each is influenced by neoliberal economic and political changes at around the same period. The chapter is a general historical overview and certainly helpful for a nonspecialist unfamiliar with contemporary Spanish and Mexican history. The bulk of the literary analyses occur in chapters two to five, each of which examines a particular aspect of the noir novel’s relationship to subversion, modernization, history/memory, and imperialism, respectively.

Two of the book’s main strengths are the detail of the close readings with which Nichols supports his thesis, and the breadth of texts through which he makes his claims. It is evident that Nichols is well-versed in the works of these two novelists, and he moves between their novels with ease. Though this movement may be confusing at first for a reader not as familiar with the plotlines and trajectories of each novelist’s oeuvre, it works well to amply support the author’s claims about the similitude between the works by Taibo and Vázquez Montalbán as an example of a revolutionary sort of novela negra.

Nichols’s reading of metanarrative in Taibo’s La vida misma (1987) in chapter two is one of the best in the book. At first glance it seems to diverge somewhat from his overall argument about neoliberalism, since it focuses more abstractly on literary conceptions of the boundary between reality and fiction than on globalization. A careful reader, though, will pick up on the connection between this analysis and the argument set forth in the introduction to the chapter: that by subverting the division between reality and fiction, Taibo and Vázquez Montalbán consistently enact the role of the intellectual as a revolutionary. This role, convincingly argued, sets the stage for the following chapters’ discussions of the detective as a reader of globalized society. The detective’s questioning of reality, and especially the reality of everyday life, is a means of subverting normative discourses and practices of capitalism by reading culture differently and modeling that perspective for the novels’ own readers.

The everyday application of this reading practice is explored in Nichols’s examination...