The reality that triumphs over the form : the crime novel in Mario Mendoza, "Lady Massacre"

The reality that triumphs over the form: The crime novel in Mario Mendoza, Lady Massacre Paradoxically, in Colombia, whose past and present time are marked by the continuous waves of violence, the crime or noir fiction is a marginal sub-genre. In fact, it has never appeared in its orthodox form in Colombian literature. The genre, which for some decades has served as a recurrent instrument to focus on the complicated and violent reality of modern societies, in contemporary Colombian fiction is subject to constant reinvention and perpetual hybridization. One of the authors recognized within this field of artistic production is Mario Mendoza (1964). The article studies his novel Lady Massacre (2013) with the aim of observing how Mendoza manages the traditional ingredients of the crime fiction (the crime, the detective, the investigation, the resolution of the enigma, and the social background) to reinvent the genre in the Colombian context