I'm a long-time lurker (and long-time appreciator) of this
group, but as a Bolano fan have to strongly second mrt's
endorsement of _The Savage Detectives_. It's a brilliant
novel on its own, sort of an _On The Road_ with paragraph
breaks, and while it is not wholy concerned with criminals
(though there are plenty of them), Bolano himself appreciated
crime fiction and said in his last interview that if he could
be anything other than a writer, he'd be a detective.
The following description of _2666_, which is currently being
translated into English for Farrar, Straus & Giraux,
indicates that it falls directly into noirish
territory:
"Divided into five sections that Bolano first envisioned as
separate novels, to be published one a year, "2666" begins
with the hunt for a writer who has disappeared. But the
search for the writer converges with the efforts of police
confronting a serial killer who preys on female factory
workers in a Mexican border town."
A shorter novel about the search for a serial killer is his
_Distant Star_, which is an extended version of the final
story that appears in his latest "novel," _Nazi Literatures
in the Americas_.
Mike
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