The Panamanian thriller as a noir novel (divergent)

Abstract

Osvaldo Reyes and Ramón Francisco Jurado are the two great writers of Panamanian crime novels. Their works are interesting because they are different from the Panamanian narrative tradition, on the one hand, and in comparison with the Latin American or Central American neo-police, on the other. They even diverge from the canon of the English or North American crime novel. These are texts whose cultural references have more to do with the audiovisual world (cinema, television, comics) than with the literary universe itself. When we examine the narrative production of Osvaldo Reyes and Ramón Francisco Jurado, we can see the debts with cinema and television series both at the technical level (narrative technique) and at the level of content. The dominant theme will no longer be, as in other detective novels, enigma, social analysis, morality, psychology or aesthetics, but pure emotion. In this sense, there will be a metamorphosis from the genre of the detective novel to the thriller, which has been so successful in the art of cinema. Nor will the protagonist be the positive hero of yesteryear, but a problematic figure who brings together the profound changes in the aesthetic sensibility of our time, both in terms of creators and readers and spectators.