The Transatlantic Genesis of the Novela Negra

Abstract

In his opening statement at a conference at Brown University in 1999, Julio Ortega spoke of his multidisciplinary Trans-Atlantic Project as an attempt to attend more carefully to cultural processes involved in a “backward and forward triangulation” of interactions between Spain, the United States, and Latin America during the modern age. In the field of contemporary Hispanic literary studies, there would seem to be few areas of production so starkly determined by such triangulation as the crime fiction known in Spanish as novela negra, the contemporary, transnational genre descended from early twentieth-century U.S. hard-boiled writing.1 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,2 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. Indeed, the very prevalence of the term novela negra (literally “black novel”) is testimony to the multiple deviations involved in the constitution of the genre, reflecting as it does the decision of Parisian publisher Gallimard to identify its own influential series of translations of U.S. hard-boiled novels, the Serie Noire, by means of black covers beginning in 1945.