"Memórias de Polícias" em Portugal: A Utopia de um Novo Herói

Abstract

The study of the strategies undertaken by some Portuguese writers, in the middle-20th century in order to create a Portuguese detective fiction, with a police officer as the hero, led to a thorough research of "real-life police  memoirs", i.e., of (auto)biographical writings, focusing on that emblematic figure of modern civilization. Therefore, one looked for the emergence of another type of stories - which might pose as an alternative to traditional and popular stories of lawbreakers. The conclusion was that the scant prodution of that type of narratives (only three books found), and, above all, the way the policemen and their methods were depicted couldn't contribute at all to rise of a new  type of hero. On the contrary, they concurred to reinforce the myth of the good criminal and the traditional popular sympathy for criminals in the 20th-century Portuguese cultural imaginary.