ABSTRACT
Memory is linked to narrative at the most basic level; what witnesses remember are the elements of “what we know” that assist the detective’s reconstruction of criminal events. Germany is the obvious place to begin an exploration of how crime fiction concerns itself with the history of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Rabinovici’s Suche nach M. explores the silence of trauma that informs relationships between victims and their children. The end of the dictatorship in Chile saw a minor boom in crime writing, especially novels about the legacy of the recent past and how it marks the present. It is significant that many writers negotiating this legacy turned to the global paradigm of the Holocaust to help frame their concerns. There have been some historical crime novels dealing with the foundational years of the modern Irish nation but none yet that explicitly deploy the trope of memory.
