SOURCE: "Novels and 'Noir' in New York," in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 4, Autumn, 1995, pp. 733-39.

In the essay below, Kerr explicates the narrative features of Black Novel in terms of conventional crime fiction and its relation to the novela negra genre.

Near the end of part I of Novela negra con argentinos, one of the novel's protagonists, Roberta Aguilar, an Argentine writer living in New York, considers how to deal with a potentially significant set of papers—more specifically, an unfinished novel manuscript and some of its author's notebooks, which Roberta has removed from the apartment of Agustín Palant, also an Argentine writer in New York. Agustín is the author of the pages with which Roberta is preoccupied and also the apparent perpetrator of the crime (a murder) around which Valenzuela's novela negra and its investigations revolve. The narrator presents Roberta's dilemma as follows: "Pensar...