Resumen de “Elementar, meu caro Watson”, Jô Soares Reinvents the Classics
Detective fiction -with its roots primarily in Europe and the United States- was slow to catch on in Brazil, where national authors did not attempt more than small forays into the genre for most of the twentieth century. This was due in large part to the particularities of Brazilian society, in which law enforcement agencies, rife with corruption, perpetuated the idea that a hero detective who dedicated himself to solving a crime was very foreign. The 1960s saw more Brazilian authors writing detective fiction. A boom in detective literature took place in the 1990s when the end of the dictatorship caused a relaxation of censorship. Among these authors was Jô Soares, whose 1995 novel O xangô de Baker Street not only places a classical whodunit on Brazilian soil, but also adapts an icon of the genre, Sherlock Holmes, to Brazilian society. By using the Brazilian idea of the carnivalesque, Soares inverts the typical role of Holmes and reinvents the character in a decidedly Brazilian detective novel, rather than merely modifying the British format.
