Ramón Díaz Eterovic's "Neopolicial Criollo"

Abstract

The Chilean novelist Ramón Diaz Eterovic has created a series of detective novels centering around the character of private eye Heredia. The literary structure of these novels draws in equal measure from two opposed variations of the detective genre: the European and the Anglo-American canonical detective novel and the American hard-boiled detective novel of the 1930's. But Diaz Eterovic has transformed their narrative codes in order to produce a third alternative, which I call the "neopolicial criollo. " In this paper, I study how those transformations take place in the novels centering around Heredia, the correlation between fiction and historical reality, and the particular literary construction el the character "Heredia" resulting from that correlation.