David Viñas' Criminal Biographies

Abstract

In his early years as storyteller, David Viñas wrote-under the pseudonym of Pedro Pago-three novels about famous Argentine bandits: Chicho Grande, Chicho Chico and Mate Cocido. Published in 1953 in the collection Crime, these novels have received almost no attention. This paper intends to show that these texts have some fundamental features and elements of Viñas' narrative work and screenplays of the subsequent years. Also, the three stories are significant from the perspective of the history of detective fiction in Argentina. In contrast to the history of the genre elaborated by Walsh the same year (1953), from a point of view that places in the center the classical whodunit story, this collection prove the existence of a different tradition, which pay less attention to the mystery and deductive resolution than to the criminal biography and its social determinations.