Facundo y los orígenes del policial campero argentino

Abstract

In the literary and journalistic imagination of the 19th century, big city crowds were the perfect hideout for both murderers and criminals. It is in this context that detectives surfaced as the main characters of detective fiction. However, there is a rural forerunner to these characters: the pathfinder, a sort of detective of the countryside. This kind of texts, with rural investigators and criminals, has had a significant development in Argentina throughout history and up to the present day. This narrative form, which the author refers to as “rural detective fiction”, arose in the mid-nineteenth century. In Facundo, Sarmiento is the first writer to introduce elements of rural criminality, treating them in a similar fashion to the emerging genre. This paper aims to examine the origins of this particular genre in the aforementioned work.