Antiheroes: Mexico and Its Detective Novel

Stavans's overall argument is that, in a national arena where moral decadence and political corruption prevail, the detective genre has been forced to embrace the hard-boiled model of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, rather than exploring its links to the more high-brow, sophisticated British tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. An enlightening treatise on parody as a literary device, this book is a fiesta that students of Latin American literature in particular, and fans of the art of slighting in general, will not want to miss.