"La matanza de Atocha": telling a real crime among journalism and noir fiction

Abstract

This study explores the presence of the noir gender’s elements in texts which cannot be considered as pure literature. The interest in this type of "hybrid" writings, combines the techniques and narrative forms with the journalistic field procedures; particularly, this is a study about a series of reports published by Rosa Montero in El País about the 1977 Massacre of Atocha. The last chapter of these mentioned journalistic works, published twenty-seven years after the appearance of the first three parts, can be considered as the final part, what makes peculiar the author’s work. Therefore, the study tries to demonstrate how this aspect, apparently related to the extra-textual dimension, affects the intrinsic nature of the texts themselves, contributing to the development of the study which is focused on the points of contact between expository and creative modalities, typical of literature, with the constituent methods of journalistic language.