num_pages: 97
description: Anyone who has screened Orson Welles’s TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) knows that the border between Mexico and the United States, what is known as ‘la frontera,’ is a contentious fracture, ‘una herida abierta,’ as Carlos Fuentes put it. The stories in this detective fiction anthology are born from this very same film noir/pulp fiction cauldron--a teeming, seething world of crime, surveillance, greed, desire, and more. Researching the detective fiction genre in Modern Language Notes, Emilio Sauri reminds us of a “lecture entitled ‘The Detective Story,’ where Borges observes that, ‘the detective novel has created a special type of reader,’ adding ‘If Poe created the detective story, he subsequently created the reader of detective fiction.’ Borges's interest in this genre, of course, inspired his fictions, though what his remarks point to here is a more generalizable concept of literature that entails a notion of the relationship between reader &amp; text, [one that] confronts literature with such ‘incredulity and suspicions’ that he or she might turn any narrative into a detective story… Emilio Sauri's words perfectly describe the worlds found in "Line of Detective Stories from the Mexican Border," edited by L. Saravia Quiroz. In addition to the editor's introduction, there are provocative stories by G. Trujillo Muñoz, H. Daniel Gómez Nieves, L. Saravia Quiroz, E. Gómez Castellanos, J. Manuel Di Bella, C. Martín Gutiérrez, F. Campbell, H. Polkinhorn, and S. Gómez Montero. From the Introduction by L. Saravia "It is not simply an anthology of detective stories about Baja California, but rather an effort by a group of writers to devise detective fiction that does not conform to the orthodoxy of the genre." notes Emilio Sauri, “‘A la pinche modernidad’":Literary Form and the End of History in Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes" MLN (125:2)
language: English
title: Line of Fire: Detective Stories from the Mexican Border
titlecomplete: Line of Fire: Detective Stories from the Mexican Border (Baja California Literature in Translation)
publisher: San Diego State Univ Press