This book examines Cuban society through a study of its detective fiction and more particularly contemporary Cuban society through the novels of the author and critic, Leonardo Padura Fuentes. The author traces the development of Cuban detective writing in the light of the work of twentieth century Western European literary critics and philosophers including Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, Terry Eagleton, Roland Barthes, Jean Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jean François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard in order to gain a better understanding of the social and historical context in which this genre emerged. The analysis includes discussion of the broader philosophical, political and historical issues raised by the Cuban revolution. The book concludes that the study of this popular genre in Cuba is of crucial importance to the scholar who wishes to reach as full an understanding of the social dynamics within that society as possible.

Transatlantic Mysteries presents a comparative study that brings together authors Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán --from two specific political contexts: post-1968 Mexico and post-Franco Spain-- who both work in one specific genre--"noir" detective fiction. In this so called age of globalization, Spain and Mexico have witnessed an explosion in the production of "noir" detective fiction which these authors choose purposefully in order to infiltrate the market with formulaic "popular" literature while simultaneously critiquing the effects of the neoliberal strategies embraced by their countries. By locating themselves at the crossroads where literature meets the market, they not only underscore the effects of capital onliterary and cultural production but also explore the possibility for their writing to resist the influences of capital and question the role of an intellectual in an era of globalization. At the core of their writing Taibo and Vázquez Montalbánexamine the revolutionary possibilities of literature and popular culture to offer a new kind of Marxist project that revitalizes the Left by redefining the role of socially engaged literature in a globalized landscape.

The author analyses six novels of the "boom" in Cuban fiction of the 1990s that subvert homogenized views of Cuban identity.

This study examines representations of the cityscape and of a so-called "new urban violence" in both detective-centered and detectiveless crime fiction produced in Spanish America and Spain during recent decades. It documents the emergence and permutations of this production as an index not only of local perceptions of contemporary urban experience and of a contemporary urban "ecology of fear," but also as a transnational index of the globalization of literary forms and markets. It centers on the inscription of urban space in novels set in the metropolitan centers of the Hispanic World: Mexico City, Bogota, Buenos Aires, and Barcelona.

The presence of bodies and sex in detective fiction has been a long-term feature of this internationally popular genre. Titillation is at the centre of narratives reliant upon discovery and revelation: motives and criminals are slowly revealed, along with sexualized and violated bodies – from femmes fatales to the corpses of victims. A satisfying, gratifying genre for its readership, the detective novel promises the disruption and subsequent restoration of order in societies tarnished by disillusionment which hope for a better future. This book takes as its focus examples of detective fiction from Cuba and Mexico during or in the aftermath of huge social upheaval (the Special Period and the War on Drugs), analyzing representations of sexualities, bodies, and the genre itself. Through an investigation of novels by Leonardo Padura and Amir Valle of Cuba, and Bef and Rogelio Guedea of Mexico, this work investigates increasingly fluid sexualities and bodies in challenging examples of metaphysical detective fiction, a particularly anxious subgenre which challenges both the structures and limits of the detective novel and the reader’s understanding of true and false and right and wrong, representative of troubling periods of severe social disruption for Cuba and Mexico.

"Padura’s Heretics spans and defies literary categories . . . ingenious." —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air A sweeping novel of art theft, anti-Semitism, contemporary Cuba, and crime from a renowned Cuban author, Heretics is Leonardo Padura's greatest detective work yet. In 1939, the Saint Louis sails from Hamburg into Havana’s port with hundreds of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Nazi regime. From the docks, nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches as the passengers, including his mother, father, and sister, become embroiled in a fiasco of Cuban corruption. But the Kaminskys have a treasure that they hope will save them: a small Rembrandt portrait of Christ. Yet six days later the vessel is forced to leave the harbor with the family, bound for the horrors of Europe. The Kaminskys, along with their priceless heirloom, disappear. Nearly seven decades later, the Rembrandt reappears in an auction house in London, prompting Daniel’s son to travel to Cuba to track down the story of his family’s lost masterpiece. He hires the down-on-his-luck private detective Mario Conde, and together they navigate a web of deception and violence in the morally complex city of Havana. In Heretics, Leonardo Padura takes us from the tenements and beaches of Cuba to Rembrandt’s gloomy studio in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, telling the story of people forced to choose between the tenets of their faith and the realities of the world, between their personal desires and the demands of their times. A grand detective story and a moving historical drama, Padura’s novel is as compelling, mysterious, and enduring as the painting at its center.

Crime Fiction in the Caribbean: Reframing Crime and Justice is the first academic book to focus on crime fiction by anglophone Caribbean writers. It explores how contemporary writers experiment with the crime genre in order to convey, contextualize, and comment on crime and justice in Caribbean countries. Lucy Evans reads crime fiction as a versatile mode of writing that can be politically engaged, and that-in a Caribbean context-can expose power structures embedded in the region's multi-layered history of colonial conquest, genocide of Indigenous populations, plantation agriculture, transatlantic slavery, and indentured labour. This book covers fiction set in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados, Grenada, and Haiti, discussing novels by Elizabeth Nunez, Jacob Ross, Marlon James, Harischandra Khemraj, Esther Figueroa, Edwidge Danticat, Cherie Jones, and several others. Evans considers how fiction by anglophone Caribbean writers not only reflects upon the social realities of crime and crime control in the Caribbean, but also at times contests or complicates scholarly, popular, and legal perspectives. She argues that through their engagement with the crime genre, these writers raise pressing questions about what constitutes crime and justice in a Caribbean context, and about accountability. Looking beyond the traditional focus of crime fiction and criminology on individual acts of wrongdoing, their fiction highlights systemic social harms rooted in the region's colonial past. Reading crime fiction through the lens of criminological research, Crime Fiction in the Caribbean brings the study of literary writing into scholarly debate on crime in the Caribbean. At the same time, it extends the global turn in crime fiction studies, focusing on a region that has been sidelined even in studies which examine the genre's international dimensions.

For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.

Written by some of the best-known independent scholars, citizen journalists, cyber-activists, and bloggers living in Cuba today, this book presents a critical, complete, and unbiased overview of contemporary Cuba. In this era of ever-increasing globalization and communication across national borders, Cuba remains an isolated island oddly out of step with the rest of the world. And yet, Cuba is beginning to evolve via the important if still insufficient changes instituted by Raul Castro, who became president in 2008. This book supplies a uniquely independent, accurate, and critical perspective in order to evaluate these changes in the context of the island's rich and complex history and culture. Organized into seven topical chapters that address geography, history, politics and government, economics, society, culture, and contemporary issues, readers will gain a broad, insightful understanding of one of the most unusual, fascinating, and often misunderstood nations in the Western Hemisphere.

Originally published in 2003, The Light Inside is a ground-breaking study of an Afro-Cuban secret society, its sacred arts, and their role in modern Cuban cultural history. Enslaved Africans and creoles developed the Abakuá Society, a system of men’s fraternal lodges, in urban Cuba beginnings in 1836. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the country, the book’s novel approach builds on close readings of dazzling Abakuá altars, chalk-drawn signs, and hooded masquerades. It looks at the art history of Abakuá altars, not only tracing changing styles but also how they evolve through cycles of tradition and renovation. The Light Inside reflects the essence of the artists’ creativity and experience: through adornment, altars project the powerful spirituality of Abakuá practice, an aesthetic strategy. The book also traces a biography of Abakuá objects – their shifting forms and meanings – as they participated in successive periods of Cuban cultural history. The book constructs close rhetorical and visual analyses of changing representations of the Abakuá, spanning nineteenth-century arts and letters, modern ethnographic texts, museum displays, paintings, and late twentieth century commercial kitsch. This interdisciplinary work combines art history, African Diaspora, cultural studies and cultural anthropology with Latin American.