Abstract
The popularity inside and outside Cuba of Leonardo Padura’s Mario Conde series
has certainly had a positive impact, as it has served to catch the attention of
many readers who until recently perceived the police procedural as a minor
genre. Similarly, Padura's novels have led to a series of studies, many of them
written by academics usually reluctant to pay attention to crime fiction. At the
same time, however, the impact of Padura’s novels, and the tendency to focus
exclusively on them, has meant that few detailed analyses have been published
on both the Cuban neopolicial as a phenomenon, and the work of certain writers
in particular.
Against this trend, this essay focuses on the Leo Martin trilogy, by Cuban writer
Lorenzo Lunar (Que en vez de infierno encuentres gloria, 2003; La vida es un
tango, 2005; Usted es la culpable, 2006), with the aim to show how the author
develops his own crime fiction framework, born not as a mere annex to Padura's
novels, but rather as a way of dismantling the ideological and formal parameters
of the Cuban revolutionary detective fiction.
has certainly had a positive impact, as it has served to catch the attention of
many readers who until recently perceived the police procedural as a minor
genre. Similarly, Padura's novels have led to a series of studies, many of them
written by academics usually reluctant to pay attention to crime fiction. At the
same time, however, the impact of Padura’s novels, and the tendency to focus
exclusively on them, has meant that few detailed analyses have been published
on both the Cuban neopolicial as a phenomenon, and the work of certain writers
in particular.
Against this trend, this essay focuses on the Leo Martin trilogy, by Cuban writer
Lorenzo Lunar (Que en vez de infierno encuentres gloria, 2003; La vida es un
tango, 2005; Usted es la culpable, 2006), with the aim to show how the author
develops his own crime fiction framework, born not as a mere annex to Padura's
novels, but rather as a way of dismantling the ideological and formal parameters
of the Cuban revolutionary detective fiction.
Translated title of the contribution | Towards a new poetics of Cuban police: The trilogy of Leo Martin, Lorenzo Lunar Cardedo |
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Original language | Spanish |
Pages (from-to) | 257-269 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Altre Modernita: rivista di studi letterari e culturali |
Volume | 15 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - May 2016 |