Reflexiones en torno al oficio de detective en México: el caso de Héctor Belascoarán Shayne

Abstract

Taking as a starting point that the crime novel in Mexico has been nationalized with the neopolicial developed by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, this study addresses the presence of those reflections on the detective oc­cupation within the Mexican context included in his nine novels featuring Héctor Belascoarán Shayne. These reflections, which constitute judgments and qualifications towards the aforementioned character, as well as com­parisons between him and the classic references of the crime novel, ques­tion the existence and the plausibility of this occupation in Mexican reality, while in turn they outline a series of characteristics of the Mexican detec­tive, and at the same time presenting an example of the realism to which the Taibo’s crime literature aspires. This study, therefore, aims to show that the difficult assimilation of the existence of a detective in Mexico should be considered as a feature of the nationalization of the neopolicial genre.