A narrativa policial de Rubem Fonseca : o caso Mandrake, a bíblia e a bengala

Abstract

In 2005, Rubem Fonseca releases the book named, Mandrake, a Bíblia e a bengala, where one of his most famous characters reappears, the lawyer Paulo Mendes, known as Mandrake, in more two stories of investigative nature. This is a study made in order to observe how Rubem Fonseca recreates, in the present work, aspects previously presented in other stories carried out by the detective-lawyer Mandrake: the tradition of police literature appropriation and the displacement of the rules of genre. For that, based on theoretical concepts by Medeiros e Albuquerque (1973, 1979); Mandel (1988); Boileau & Narcejac (1991); Todorov (2003), we analyse the characteristics of the detective genre, giving special emphasis to two main subgenres: the enigma novel, based on the belief in the analytical rationality that leads the detective to the perfect final resolution of the crimes; and the black novel, which takes place in the brutal underworld of corruption and crime, ambiguous relationships, which claims the emergence of a new kind of detective: hard, brutal and fallible. Thereafter, we will conduct a brief presentation of police literature produced in Brazil, and then we will outline the main characteristics of Rubem Fonseca writings. Finally, we intend to analyse how the author subverts the limits of the detective genre in the composition of his novels, to the extent that activates his own literary techniques in both subgenres presenting Mandrake either as an ambiguous detective, or as a detective who does not solve crimes.