Line of Fire: Detective Stories from the Mexican Border (Baja California Literature in Translation) Paperback – August, 1996
An inside look: In a lecture entitled "The Detective Story," Borges observes that, "The detective novel has created a special type of reader," and adds, "If Poe created the detective story, he subsequently created the reader of detective fiction" (492)..Yet, what Borges describes... draws our attention to what appears to be an insight into the ontology of literature that detective fiction provides. For what literature is, according to Borges, is "an aesthetic event" that "requires the conjunction of reader and text" (491); and what the detective story highlights, he suggests, is the way in which the reader-any reader-forms the conditions of possibility for this "aesthetic event."
"A la pinche modernidad":Literary Form and the End of History in Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes" by Emilio Sauri, MLN (125:2).
Emilio Sauri's words perfectly describe the worlds found in "Line of Fire: Detective Stories from the Mexican Border," edited by L. Saravia Quiroz. In addition to the editor's introduction, there are evocative stories by G. Trujillo Muñoz, H. Daniel Gómez Nieves, L. Saravia Quiroz, E. Gómez Castellanos, J. Manuel Di Bella, C. Martín Gutiérrez, F. Campbell, H. Polkinhorn, and S. Gómez Montero. From the Introduction by L. Saravia Quiroz: "It is not simply an anthology of detective stories about Baja California, but rather an effort by a group of writers to devise detective fiction that does not conform to the orthodoxy of the genre."
