Latin American Detectives against Power: Individualism, the State, and Failure in Crime Fiction

This book examines how Latin American detective stories portray individualism and the state through the figures of the private eye and the police. Fabricio Tocco argues that these portrayals constitute a far more radical critique than the one developed by the Anglo-American canon, culminating in a transnational ?poetics of failure? rooted in dissatisfaction with the neoliberal state.

Fabricio Tocco’s Latin American Detectives against Power is a magnificent and ambitious work of literary analysis and cultural critique. It is essential reading for anybody interested in the history of the detective genre in Latin America. Moreover, it is also a case study in cultural translation, influence, and resistance, as Tocco shows how and why Latin American authors–from Borges to Bolaño, Ricardo Piglia to Rubem Fonseca–write both within and against a literary tradition imported from Britain and the United States. Finally, and most significantly, this book’s careful and sensitive close readings of individual texts open up to a general theory of the workings of the state in the Southern Cone and elsewhere. Tocco vindicates detective fiction as political philosophy, as a vector through which, in the aftermath of state violence and neoliberalism, Latin Americans have experimented in new ways to think and practice community.