San-Antonio is a positive, all-action hero.   His novels, a literature of affirmation. And of exclamations. Not of doubts, it would seem.  On the face of it, the textual reality might be a bit more complex. And a machine, reading the San-Antonio novels, might challenge some of the beliefs and impressions human readers might form, on their basis of their impressionable reading.  There are more questions than exclamations, for one.  Of course, the mystery genre entails consubstantially a fair amount of questions. The narrative tension thrives on hypotheses, conjectures, interrogations and all type of questionings.  The opposition between two crime fiction subgenres,  between, on the one hand, a “hardboiled”, violent, action literature and on the other, a literature of mystery and detection,  is not as clear-cut in this respect. Both subgenres are riddled with questions. Maybe, these questions are more existential, or metaphysical in the “hardboiled”, noir genre, and of more logical, speculative or even academic nature in the Mystery genre. But this  empirical observation, might still need to be addressed and backed up in a more scientific manner. Continue reading →