Spanish Women Authors of Serial Crime Fiction


Book Description

With its focus on recent detective series featuring female investigators, this collection analyzes the authors’ treatment of current social, political and economic problems in Spain and beyond, in addition to exploring interrelations between gender, globalization, the environment and technology. The contributions here reveal the varied ways in which the use of a series allows for a deeper consideration of such issues, in addition to permitting the more extensive development of the protagonist investigator and her reactions to, and methods of, dealing with personal and professional challenges of the twenty-first century. In these stories, the authors employ strategies that break with long-standing conventions, developing crime fiction in unexpected ways, incorporating elements of science fiction, the supernatural, and the historical novel, as well as varied geographical settings (small towns, provincial cities, and rural communities) beyond the urban environment, all of which contributes to the reinvigoration of the genre.




Killing Carmens


Book Description

Focuses on women's crime writing from Spain and offers an approach to Spanish crime fiction, combining literary criticism with sociological and criminological theory. This multidisciplinary study analyses how female authors use crime and detective genres to analyse the role and position of their countrywomen.




Crime Scene Spain


Book Description

This essay collection examines the changing cultural, political and physical landscape of Spain as represented in Spanish crime fiction of the last three decades. The first several essays focus on crime fiction set in Barcelona and look at, among other topics, the symbiotic relationship between the city and the detective in Francisco Gonzalez Ledesma's long-running Inspector Mendez series, Manuel Vazquez Montalban's treatments of the 1992 Summer Olympic Games, and place and identity in Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett's Petra Delicado series. Other essays examine regional and cultural illiteracy in Jorge Martinez Reverte's Galvez series and Spain's changing urban centers as represented in Andreu Martin's El blues de la semana mas negra.




Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Detective Fiction


Book Description

The image of the hard-boiled private investigator from gritty pulp fiction, a terse and mysterious figure, has become increasingly universal as the detective novel crosses more and more borders. A booming genre in Latin America, Spain and other Hispanic cultures, detective fiction has transcended the limitations of its influences. Hispanic authors relatively new to the genre have published novels and series popular with the public, while a number of well-known writers have adapted the genre to reflect the concurrent globalization of modern society and the crimes within it. This volume presents a compilation of 11 critical essays on genero negro--contemporary detective fiction in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian canon. Surveying the last twenty years, the text analyzes emerging trends in this rapidly evolving genre, as well as the mutations and innovations taking place within the style. The first section of the book is dedicated to the detective fiction of Spain and Portugal. The second section surveys works from Latin America and the United States, where topics touch on universal subjects like crime, identity and feminism.




Spanish and Latin American Women’s Crime Fiction in the New Millennium


Book Description

Crime fiction written by women in Spain and Latin America since the late 1980s has been successful in shifting attention to crimes often overlooked by their male counterparts, such as rape and sexual battery, domestic violence, child pornography, pederasty, and incest. In the twenty-first century, social, economic, and political issues, including institutional corruption, class inequality, criminalized oppression of immigrant women, crass capitalist market forces, and mediatized political and religious bodies, have at their core a gendered dimension. The conventions of the original noir, or novela negra, genre have evolved, such that some women authors challenge the noir formulas by foregrounding gender concerns while others imagine new models of crime fiction that depart drastically from the old paradigms. This volume, highlighting such evolution in the crime fiction genre, will be of interest to students, teachers, and scholars of crime fiction in Latin America and Spain, to those interested in crime fiction by women, and to readers familiar with the sub-genres of crime fiction, which include noir, the thriller, the police procedural, and the “cozy” novel.




Policing Gender and Alicia Giménez Bartlett's Crime Fiction


Book Description

Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s popular crime series, written in Spanish and organized around the exploits of Police Inspector Petra Delicado and Deputy Inspector Fermin Garzon, is arguably the most successful detective series published in Spain during the previous three decades. Nina L. Molinaro examines the tensions between the rhetoric of gender differences espoused by the woman detective and the orthodox ideology of the police procedural. She argues that even as the series incorporates gender differences into the crime series formula, it does so in order to correct women, naturalize men’s authority, sanction social hierarchies, and assuage collective anxieties. As Molinaro shows, with the exception of the protagonist, the women characters require constant surveillance and modification, often as a result of men’s supposedly intrinsic protectiveness or excessive sexuality. Men, by contrast, circulate more freely in the fictional world and are intrinsic to the political, psychological, and economic prosperity of their communities. Molinaro situates her discussion in Petra Delicado’s contemporary Spain of dog owners, ¡Hola!, Russian cults, and gated communities.




Death Rites


Book Description

Petra Delicado, a Barcelona police inspector assigned to a desk job, returns to the homicide department to investigate the rapes of young girls by a serial rapist who only leaves a circular mark on his victims' forearms.




Spanish Culture and Society


Book Description

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




The Shadow of the Wind


Book Description

The New York Times bestseller “The Shadow of the Wind is ultimately a love letter to literature, intended for readers as passionate about storytelling as its young hero.” —Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice) “One gorgeous read.” —Stephen King Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax’s books in existence. Soon Daniel’s seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.




Iberian Crime Fiction


Book Description

Iberian Crime Fiction is the first volume in English to provide an extensive overview of crime fiction in Spain and Portugal. While the origins of peninsular crime fiction are traced in Nancy Vosburg's introductory chapter to the volume, the essays focus on specific topics that provide readers with a sense of the development of the genre in the second half of the 20th-century and current trends in the 21st-century. Patty Hart, whose The Spanish Sleuth introduced English-speaking readers to early crime fiction in Spain, provides a summary account of the development of the crime novel from the 1950s through the 1980s, highlighting the major authors and works that set the stage for the boom that followed the establishment of the novela negra tradition in the 1970s. This tradition, spearheaded by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, is the subject of a separate essay by Maria Balibrea that analyzes the socio-political conditions that gave rise to the novela negra. NancyVosburg studies the emergence of a feminine/feminist crime novel in the 1980s and 1990s and the subversion of masculine codes associated with crime fiction, while Stewart King analyzes crime fiction from the Catalan, Basque, and Galician autonomous regions of Spain, focusing on the political realities that resulted in a different use of the genre as a vehicle of regional nationalism. David Knutson traces contemporary trends in Spanish crime fiction, beginning in the 1990s and up to the present. Paul Castro's essay documents the emergence of crime fiction in Portugal and the major works/authors through to the present.