Latin American Detectives Against Power: Individualism, the State, and Failure in Crime Fiction by Fabricio Tocco (review)

countryside was shattered twice—first by the murder of three-year old Francis Kent; second by Inspector Jonathan Whicher’s correct identification of middle-class Constance Kent as her half-brother’s murderer. This brutal episode, in which the local bourgeoisie refused to accept that one of their own could be a murderer, arguably set a cultural tone in English policing for the rest of the nineteenth century—if not in fact, then certainly in fiction. In contemporary cultural representations of crime and policing—including the most famous literary sleuths of the so-called Golden Era, such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and even Philip Marlowe—the official police are invariably a last port of call, while the middle classes remain suspicious of detectives like the real-life Inspector Whicher and look after their own. In Latin American Detectives Against Power, Fabricio Tocco agrees that detective fiction has its roots in these Anglo-AmeriReferences Bens, J. (2020). The Indigenous paradox: Rights, sovereignty, and culture in the Americas. University of Pennsylvania Press.