Buenos Aires

Abstract

The national tradition of detective writing in Argentina may not be the most prolific among Spanish-speaking nations, but it is almost certainly the longest. The first two recognizably generic detective novels written in Spanish were published in Buenos Aires in 1877 by a lawyer, journalist, and legislator named Luis V. Varela, who became president of the Argentine Supreme Court in the same year of their publication. Both Varela and Eduardo Holmberg, the only other Argentine detective novelist of the nineteenth century, were affiliated with the Generation of 1880, an elite of progressive liberal writers of Positivist orientation who were intimately involved in both the founding of a national narrative tradition and the shaping of the modern Argentine state.¹ During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Buenos Aires emerged as a literary capital and the seat of South America’s most powerful publishing industry, and as I have established in Chapter 1, part of this development consisted in the importation, consumption, and domestic production of translations of European and U.S. popular and pulp fiction. The sophisticated achievements of the Sur writers in the classical detective genre during the 1940s constitute the best-known continuation of the early initiatives of Varela, Holmberg, and other River Plate pioneers, such as Paul Groussac and Horacio Quiroga.