Altos y bajos fondos porteños and “El crimen de la mosca azul”. Science, Pseudoscience and Occultism in Late Stories of Early Detective Fiction in Argentina

Abstract

Between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, the scientific culture of the period intersected with ideas coming from pseudosciences and spiritisms –then at the height of their popularity– to shape an imaginary. This imaginary was mainly expressed through the so-called scientific fantasy (Gasparini, 2012; Quereilhac, 2016) and permeated some of the productions of the early detective fiction, especially Eduardo Holmberg´s stories, which were built on the hybridization between both genres. This paper examines a number of early twentieth-century stories that show both continuities with and departures from this tradition. Specifically, we will focus on some of the stories included in the saga Altos y bajos fondos porteños (1911-1912), by Pablo Daronel, and on “El crimen de la mosca azul”, by Enrique R. Lavalle. These fictions rework topics and motifs of scientific fantasy and, while expanding themes and promoting different narrative formulas for the genre, they distance themselves from their nineteenth-century predecessors by including parodic elements and breaches on plausibility.