Image Credit: Costa-Gavras, Missing (1982).

Please join us for a CuSPP Seminar in person (BPB W3.03) and online on Thursday 23 October from 1-2. Please refer to the CuSPP email or email Thomas.Nulley-Valdes@anu.edu.au for the link.

ABSTRACT: The secret liaisons between Latin America and the thriller are older than they seem. Following the southbound journey of gringos—Early Modern Southern European colonisers, nineteenth-century American and British swindlers, Nazi Germany spies, Cold War CIA agents—this presentation traces how the region became inseparable from the genre long before local authors and filmmakers claimed it as their own. The 1906 appearance of the word “thriller” attached to Roy Rockwood’s Jack North’s Treasure Hunt: Daring Adventures in South America, an American adventure novel set in Chile and Peru, is no accident: Latin America’s exotic and dangerous fauna, along with its civil wars and deceptive landscapes, were already paving the way for the genre. An excerpt from the first chapter of my forthcoming book Precarious Secrets: A History of the Latin American Political Thriller (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2025), this presentation examines how Rockwood’s novel and Argentine-English Guillermo Enrique Hudson’s The Purple Land that England Lost (1885) shaped the work of Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, and Costa-Gavras: the American and European political thriller set in Latin America, an embryonic but key stage in the history of the genre in the region. This presentation argues that what looks like imperialistic appropriation is a secret liaison, where American and European models become difficult to disentangle from Latin America’s later forays into the thriller, and from the fact that genres can always be re-appropriated by those represented within them.

SPEAKER BIO: Dr Fabricio Tocco is a Lecturer in Spanish at SLLL. He is the author of the novel Parece diciembre (2025, Equidistancias) and two books, Latin American Detectives against Power (Lexington, ICFA Book Prize 2022) and Precarious Secrets (2025, University of Texas Press), which inspired the documentary Secretos Precarios (SBS on Demand, 2025).