The New Queens of Crime: Images of Women Detectives in Contemporary Argentinean and Mexican Literature

The New Queens of Crime: Images of Women Detectives in Contemporary Argentinean and Mexican Literature Gillian Barbara Price Lincoln, Nebraska Master of Arts, University of Virginia, 2010 Bachelor of Arts, Carleton College, 2008 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese University of Virginia August, 2014 ii © Copyright by Gillian Price All Rights Reserved August 2014 iii Acknowledgements I have accrued many debts in writing this project. Without the support and guidance of the following people, this project never would have come to fruition. First, I would like to thank my dissertation director, Gustavo Pellón, for his enthusiasm and guidance throughout my project, his unwavering support, and thoughtful revisions. Thank you for your patient listening, letting me “think aloud” during many office hours, and steering me on course when I otherwise might have meandered. Daniel Chávez likewise has been decisive in both the formation and the completion of this project. This dissertation was born from a seminar on Mexican Literature and Film that I took with Daniel Chávez in the fall of 2010. In it, Daniel introduced me to the book that sparked this study, La muerte me da by Cristina Rivera Garza. I would also like to thank him for bringing to my attention the works of Angélica Gorodischer and Myriam Laurini. I would like to thank my other readers, Alison Weber and Alison Booth, for offering their invaluable expertise and their insightful comments and suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank Mané Lagos, who has made me a better detective, helping me track down Myriam Laurini to arrange an interview with her. Mané also brought to my attention Claudia Piñeiro’s detective fiction. This project has greatly benefitted from the numerous conversations I have had with writers within the genre over the past two years. I am most grateful to the Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese for granting me the Charles Gordon Reid, Jr. Summer Travel Fellowship, which allowed me to attend the Semana negra in Gijón, Spain during the summer of 2013. Participating in the Semana negra revitalized my enthusiasm for detective fiction and provided a rare opportunity to speak with some of the most important contemporary writers of iv detective fiction including Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Leonardo Padura, Dolores Redondo, Elia Barceló, Fritz Glockner, Noemí Sabugul and Susana Hernández. This experience enriched my project, affording valuable insight into the way writers work within a genre even as they are remaking it. I was alerted to the Semana negra by Miguel Valladares- Llata, the Spanish librarian at the University of Virginia, who assisted me in acquiring the books I needed for this trip and helped me coordinate the logistics of a trip to Gijón, Spain. My thanks go to Miguel for both research advice and many, many shots of espresso. The Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese also invited one of the authors included in my study, Cristina Rivera Garza, to the University of Virginia in the fall of 2013. I am very grateful for this visit, as it allowed me to engage with Cristina, providing me a deeper understanding of her work. Finally, I would like to thank the Buckner W. Clay Foundation for providing the funding to interview another author included in this project, Myriam Laurini. This project was made possible by a large group of friends and family without whose support this project simply would have been impossible. Graduate students from the department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, both current and former, have contributed to this project in ways small and large. Firstly, I would like to thank a former UVA Spanish graduate student, and now professor at the University of Wyoming, Emily Hind, for having suggested to me Carlos Carrera and Sabina Berman’s film, Backyard/Traspatio. Although we have never met in person, she, too, has offered words of advice and enthusiasm about my project. My parents, Ken Price and Renée Hall, have offered both practical academic advice as well as loving support throughout this project and all of my graduate studies. To my sister, Ashley Price and her fiancée, Doug Gillie, thank you for your words of encouragement, your interest in my topic, and for giving us so many happy occasions to celebrate this past year, not least of which is the v newest member of the family, Graham Price Gillie. Finally, I would like to thank my boyfriend, Ryan Johnson, my indefatigable proofreader who read every page of this project despite having numerous deadlines of his own. Thank you for letting me think through many of my arguments aloud, for many useful suggestions, and for cheering me on, especially in the final months of this project. Table of Contents Introduction 7 Chapter 1 Syria Poletti and the Family-Centered Detective Narrative 23 Chapter 2 Reinventing Miss Marple: Angélica Gorodischer’s Comic 72 Detectives in Floreros de alabastro, alfombras de Bokhara and Jugo de mango Chapter 3 “El manto de silencio”: Bringing Women’s Stories to Light in 133 Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena sabe and Myriam Laurini’s Morena en rojo Chapter 4 The Doomed Dames of Detection: The Unsuccessful Sleuths 180 In Carlos Carrera and Sabina Berman’s Backyard/Traspatio and and Cristina Rivera Garza's La muerte me da Conclusion 233 Works Cited 239 7 Introduction Detective fiction is flourishing in Latin America today. The genre, which has since its inception been dominated by men,1 is now being adopted by more and more women writers. Even J.K. Rowling has ventured into the detective genre, writing novels, The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013) and The Silkworm (2014), under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.2 In the last fifty years, there has been a veritable boom in Latin American women’s detective fiction. Writers such as Syria Poletti, María Angélica Bosco, Luisa Valenzuela, Angélica Gorodischer, and Claudia Piñeiro from Argentina, and Cristina Rivera Garza from Mexico, and Marcela Serrano from Chile (Simpson, Encyclopedia 257), among others, have adopted the detective fiction frame, reworking the conventions of the detective genre in fascinating ways. In their innovative revisions of the detective figure, female authors challenge the masculinization of the genre, defying gender roles and stereotypes. While both male and female Latin American writers tend to write detective fiction that voices socio-political criticisms (Braham x), female writers adopt and modify the genre, using it also as a platform to defy stereotypical gender roles and challenge patriarchal dominance. This compelling use of detective fiction and film in Latin America has, nonetheless, received little critical attention thus far. This dissertation examines recent contributions by female writers from Argentina and Mexico, the countries that produce the largest amount of detective fiction in Latin America.3 1 One major exception is, of course, Agatha Christie, a prolific crime novelist. 2 J.K. Rowling’s novels feature a male detective, Cormoran Strike, and a female sidekick. 3 Looking back to his first years of scholarship, Yates argues that by 1960 Mexico and Argentina were the “ . two nations where [detective fiction] had been most extensively cultivated” (Forward 9). Despite detective fiction’s growing presence throughout Latin America, these countries continue to produce the largest amount of detective fiction in the region. 8 Detective Fiction: A Brief History The vast majority of critics cite Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) as the inception of the modern detective story (Giardinelli 16-17, 55; Klein, The Woman Detective 15; Rivera-Taupier 14; Simpson 10, 29; Thoms 133). Some critics, however, trace the roots of the genre to an even earlier date. Fereydoun Hoveyda, for example, considers the eighteenth-century Chinese manuscript entitled “Cases of Judge Dee” as an early example of detective fiction (35). Several other critics cite Caleb Williams (1794) by William Godwin as a vital text (Andreu 37; Horsley 21; Lehman 73; Vázquez de Parga 34-5). Nevertheless, the majority of critics, including the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, a great admirer of Poe (Bennett 263-64), agree that this American writer should be credited for truly initiating the genre. As David Lehman maintains, Nearly all the conventions of the classic whodunit—from locked rooms to least likely culprits, eccentric sleuths and their admiring companions, dullard cops, and wrongly accused bystanders—originate with Poe. The rules of detection, the crime involving a cipher that needs decoding, the theme of the murderous double, the city as a criminal landscape, the identification of the man in the crowd as ‘the type and the genius of deep crime’: All date back to a handful of Poe’s tales. (71- 72) Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin, enjoys investigative success thanks to his “ability to read the city’s inhabitants, to occupy their minds and perspectives,” and therefore uncover the perpetrator of the crime (Thoms 138). Despite the formative importance of Poe’s detective stories, Kathleen Klein appropriately suggests that many readers’ awareness of detective fiction starts with Arthur Conan Doyle’s works featuring Sherlock Holmes, the most famous character of detective fiction 9 (The Woman 15). Scaggs, among others, affirms that Poe’s Dupin clearly served as a model for Sherlock Holmes, noting their shared aptitude for astute observations of minor details, as well as their “reclusiveness, eccentricity, and penetrating analytic ability” (20). Indeed, both Poe and Conan Doyle were fundamental in formalizing the conventions of the classic detective story, and their detectives continue to shape detective fiction today. Detective Fiction in Latin America Translated works of detective fiction written by American and French authors have long been enormously popular in Latin America (Simpson, Detective 16).

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