The History of Critics
The Roaring 20s, the time of the post WW1 era, jazz age bootleggers, organized crime, gangster era, and hardboiled detective fiction. Hardboiled detective fiction is a genre of detective fiction that consist a private investigator, also known as the private eye. What really intrigues me about this genre is the way justice gets served, what I mean is the stories end in either judicial justice where the culprit goes to jail or in poetic justice, where the culprit must live with the actions of crime in the worst was possible and either the victim or the victim’s family receives closure of some sort. Another thing that I really enjoy about this genre is how the setting and society surrounding the private eye are set to match…show more content… In 1979, Lourdes Ortiz became the first female author to experiment with hardboiled detective fiction in her second novel, Picadura mortal. As stated by Alison Maginn, the author of, “Breaking the Contract in the Female Detective Novel: Lourdes Ortiz's "Picadura mortal", “her text constitutes an important contribution to the development of the genre” (Maginn, Alison). This begins to show the evolution of the hardboiled detective fiction began to break and started to give authors an opportunity to experiment this novel. As the genre began to change the so did the critics, as stated by Maginn, “The novel is by no means Ortiz's chef-d'oeuvre and has been dismissed as inconsequential by some of the few critics who have written about it”(Maginn, Allison). Maginn then explains, “Picadura mortal blends elements from more than one kind of crime writing and in many cases parodies some of the most recognizable formulae of the classic and hard-boiled” (Maggin, Allison). She also adds, “Furthermore, Ortiz is the first woman writer in the history of peninsular literature to produce a detective narrative with a female detective as protagonist” (Maggin, Allison). This shows why the critics of hardboiled detective fiction began to change over time because new authors started taking new approaches that make the genre different that how it was originally. In Johanna M. Smith’s
