The Post-Leninist Detective by Bruno Bosteels

He evoked a sentence recalled by Jaramillo that had moved him in his days of struggle; a sentence spoken in 1918, toward the very end of the betrayal of zapatismo by its temporary allies, which reappeared in the seventies as the terrible epilogue to the peasant leader's murder: "Bury the rifles where you may be able to find them again. " - Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Días de combate

A few years ago, in a talk at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in Mexico City, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the events of 1968, Taibo explained how he conceived of much of his work as part of a "narrative history of the Left in Mexico. " This project includes his experiments with the genre of the detective novel, or what he also calls, in a characteristic hybrid, the "new detective adventure novel" ("la nueva novela policiaca de aventuras"), nine of which are united by their main character, Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, a private eye, or, rather, an "independent detective" ("La palabra 'privado' le molestaba y había encontrado el apellido ideal para el oficio" ["He didn't like the sound of 'private detective. ' 'Independent' had a much better ring to it"]11) of proud Irish-Basque descent, but otherwise completely soaked in the culture, slang, and politics of "el DF."