A signpost to some Argentine and Argentine American mysteries

Bill Crider posted a comment about The Lady from Buenos Aires by John Lantigua. That got me thinking how little crime fiction I'd found from Argentina, which led me to this article by G.J. Demko on crime fiction from Argentina.

In The Lady From Buenos Aires, P.I. Willie Cuesta

"gets involved with the Argentine community in Miami. He's hired to find the daughter of a woman who was 'disappeared' twenty years ago in Argentina's 'dirty war.' In the course of his search, he runs into a diplomat, a realtor who isn't what he seems, a former CIA agent, a nightclub owner, a suspicious husband, and any number of ladies from Buenos Aires. It seems that nearly all of them have pasts they'd rather not have revealed. Murders ensue. Willie has a couple of very close calls himself."

I would be especially interested to see how well Lantigua can bring that grim period of Argentina's history to life, and also to see how he handles the challenge of making those events reverberate in an Argentine expatriate community.

The Demko article ought to interest readers of international crime fiction right from its opening sentences: "Argentine writers were among the earliest adopters and adapters of the crime fiction genre. The authors, many of whom were, and are, members of the mainstream literati, created a popular, respected, and uniquely Argentine form of mystery."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007