Spatial Nostalgia, Modernity and Early Argentine Detective Fiction

Among the earliest detective stories to emerge from Argentina, Ten Years of Investigation in the Argentine Republic by Félix Alberto de Zabalía broke with the traditions of the genre. Not only were the tales explicitly Argentine in setting and character, but they also often eschewed the detective's hallmarks of urban sophistication in favour of a more wistful rurality. This article examines the stories’ evocation of a nostalgia defined not by time but by space: a spatial nostalgia. Emerging as an expression of uneven modernity in a developing nation state, spatial nostalgia was a useful tool for promoting rural migration at a time when the Buenos Aires elite had sore need to do so. Detective fiction was an ideal conduit for this messaging, as it hid its ideological posturing behind seemingly objective claims of truth and justice. Yet neither nostalgia nor justice are neutral, and the detective's reconstruction of the crime narrative mirrors the manipulative ‘restorative nostalgia’ identified by Svetlana Boym. The reader, invited to participate as the detective's follower and student, is liable to be drawn into nostalgia's idealised vision of geography and nationhood. Thus understood, spatial nostalgia illustrates the attractions of the detective fiction genre as well as its innovative evolution at the turn of the twentieth century.