Chilean literature of the last two decades has the sign of a phenomenon. Hard boiled detective fiction has penetrated the editorial world as never before. Many of the latest writers have been flirting with the structures and themes of detective stories, they have recognized the power of this kind of narrative and the usefulness of its tools. Some of them have become habitual detective writers; but none of them has yet attained a sufficient literary quality to give the genre the aesthetic status it has achieved in other periods and latitudes.