Modulations of Detective Fiction in María Angélica Bosco’s La muerte baja en ascensor

Abstract

This research article proposes a review of some of the aspects which studies of detective fiction have remarked when analyzing La Muerte Baja en Ascensor, the 1955 novel that began María Angélica Bosco's literary career. The studies devoted to this novel have underlined the traditional or orthodox character of its proposal when interpreted from the general framework of detective fiction in the fifties. This pretext has also served to subordinate it to the later works of the author, whose forms are close to the American hardboiled novel. To relativize that exegesis of the novel, the three epigraphs of this study attempt to delineate the singularity of its modulations of the forms of the detective fiction from the place of the female characters in the plot, from the applicability of the concepts of enigma and of secrecy to its narrative structure, and to discuss, eventually, if the novel reproduces the overlapping of plots characteristic of the police genre as explained by Tzvetan Todorov. This examination will also make it possible to put the figure of the first Bosquian detective and his gnoseological methods in relation to Jorge Luis Borge’s ideas on detective fiction, and who with Adolfo Bioy Casares included this novel in “El Séptimo Círculo” collection.