José Latour

In late 2002 or early 2003, resid­ing in Spain, I read a lauda­tory arti­cle on cap­i­tal­ism in a pres­ti­gious, pro-market, right-of-centre British mag­a­zine that included this asser­tion: “Some cap­i­tal­ists are the worst ene­mies of cap­i­tal­ism.” Twenty or more years ear­lier I had con­cluded that a num­ber of politi­cians and reli­gious lead­ers are the worst ene­mies …

The human race has been unsuc­cess­fully try­ing to crack a num­ber of nuts for sev­eral mil­len­nia. In our time, bil­lions of peo­ple all over the world are greatly con­cerned with the 21st century’s social prob­lems. Most wealthy democ­ra­cies con­front predica­ments such as ter­ror­ism, wars abroad, global warm­ing, crime, drugs, ille­gal immi­gra­tion, ever-increasing prices and taxes, …

Sell­ers go to mar­ket­places to make money by offer­ing goods and ser­vices, and the same rules apply to mar­ket­places the world over. Make, har­vest or extract some­thing, price it accord­ingly and offer it for sale. It seems, though, as in the last one hun­dred years the ever-increasing role of pro­mo­tion has pro­foundly changed the buyer-seller …

I appre­ci­ate this oppor­tu­nity to share with you my views about real­ity in crime fic­tion. I look for­ward to learn­ing your opin­ions on this topic and answer­ing your ques­tions after a brief intro­duc­tion. Although I strive to cre­ate, and pre­fer to read, real­is­tic and believ­able nov­els, I am not against good unre­al­is­tic fic­tion, the key …

Hav­ing read a con­sid­er­able num­ber of crime books by Anglo and Latin Amer­i­can writ­ers, I believe that the plots of noir genre nov­els penned south of the Rio Bravo are much more polit­i­cal than the major­ity of Amer­i­can or British crime books. His­tory shows that all along the 19th and 20th cen­turies, most British and U.S. …