Barcelona

Abstract

Whereas the most specialized critics of Argentine detective fiction, including Jorge B. Rivera, Jorge Lafforgue, and Néstor Ponce, agree on the dating of their national tradition to 1877, no such agreement exists between Spanish critics. As indicated in Chapter 1, Patricia Hart and Ricardo Landeira disagree with Jose F. Colmeiro and Joan Ramon Resina in their characterization of nineteenth century texts such as Alarcón’s El clavo (The Nail), and no consensus has been established with regard to the existence, let alone the chronology, of a distinctively Spanish model of detective or crime fiction. As elsewhere, novelists and critics also dispute the exact definition of terms such as novela negra, with some, such as José R. Valles Calatrava, arguing for alternate terms, such as novela criminal. Despite the cultural implantation of the detective model at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as also discussed in Chapter 1, and the well-documented existence of a tradition of detective fiction written in Spain at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, obstacles to the assimilation and nationalization of the genre have been so formidable as to effectively prohibit, in Colmeiro’s estimation, non-ironic production in the classical ratiocinative mode. In Spain, writes Colmeiro, “What has almost never been produced is an authentic problem novel with serious literary aspirations and founded on rigorous scientific, positivist and rationalist principles, as was the intention of the classical detective novel” (La novela 260).