"Nelly", la tercera narración policial de Eduardo L. Holmberg

Abstract

344

Holmberg is –along with Waleis– the most important Argentine author of detective fiction of the nineteenth century. Critics have noticed quite enough his first two detective stories, La bolsa de huesos (1896) and La casa endiablada (1896), of the five that make up the whole; only two recent articles analyze his last two detective stories (“Don José de la Pamplina”, 1905; “Más allá de la autopsia”, 1906). In this paper I investigate Nelly (1896), his third detective story, never analyzed in relation to this genre. I try to demonstrate that these three first narrations form a trilogy and they jointly allow us to notice Holmberg’s fluctuations on his first approach to detective fiction. I hold the view that it is possible to note in Nelly elements of the Kriminalnovelle and a perceptible distance from the state law and the related paradigm of scientific culture. All three stories can be characterized as fantastic detective novels, and they promote a model of culture and nation that incorporates the foreigner and contrasts with the texts of contemporary Argentine naturalism.

Keywords

Detective fiction, Scientific culture, Fantastic literature, Kriminalnovelle, Naturalism