Ena Lucía Portela

A passionate, personal, erudite exploration of the myths of crime fiction—essential reading for lovers of the genre.

Ena Lucía Portela is not usually regarded as a genre author—she is, rather, considered one of the great voices of contemporary Cuban literature—but she is a voracious reader of crime fiction. Her personal pantheon includes authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Patricia Highsmith, Thomas Harris, Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton, Ellery Queen, Dorothy L. Sayers, Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, William Irish, Fredric Brown, and Richard Austin Freeman, among many others.

Written in a style that shuns academic constraint in favor of the sheer pleasure of reading, this collection of essays sets out to dissect the creative genius behind some of the finest works in crime fiction. Special mention must be made—given the care and admiration Portela lavishes on them—of two creations as different and eccentric as the detective Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Mathäi, the unforgettable protagonist of The Pledge by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, a man capable of driving the sense of justice to the very brink of madness.