The Novela Negra in a Transatlantic Literary Economy

Abstract

In the field of contemporary Hispanic literary studies, there would seem to be few areas of production so starkly determined by such triangulation as detective fiction, and particularly the subgenre of the novela negra. The contemporary, transnational Spanish-language genre descended from early twentieth-century U.S. hard-boiled writing. While the prestige of U.S. hard-boiled classics writers is evident in a multitude of explicit and implicit homages contained in the novela negra corpus, the dissemination of detective formulas was by no means a direct or unilinear transfer, but rather a complex process of irregular filtration through imports, translations, editions, pastiches and imitations over the course of the twentieth century. The primary poles of the triangulation that I describe here will correspond to those proposed by Ortega, but I will also follow his example by extending attention to other areas of Europe whose implication in this specific transatlantic interaction is appreciable.