Detective Fiction and Police: Reflections on Two Critic Interventions (José Pablo Feinmann and Carlos Gamerro)

Abstract

I propose a close reading on two critical interventions about crime fiction in Argentina: “Estado policial y novela negra argentina” (1991) by José Pablo Feinmann and “Para una reformulación del género policial argentino” (2006) by Carlos Gamerro. Beyond the time difference between the two, I observe aspects in common. Both texts elaborate a corpus of writers and fictions; propose an interpretative guide between the literary and the political-social series; maintain a specific interest in the relationship between crime fiction and police; and elaborate figures of enunciators who serve both as theorists of the genre and as writers of fiction. Among these four dimensions, the one that particularly interests me here is the third, since it allows me to investigate the link that is assumed between “detective fiction” and “police institution”. My conclusion is twofold: on the one hand, in both essays predominates a reductionist vision of the genre, since a kind of necessity is emphasized in the representation of the social order; on the other, its main objective seems to lie in intervening directly on the definitions of the detective fiction in Argentina (and, on this point, both texts acquire an undoubtedly prescriptive nuance).

Keywords

• género policial
• literatura argentina
• policía
• josé pablo feinmann
• carlos gamerro