Crimes from pulp fiction books reenacted by a real murderer. A locked-room mystery disrupting a conference about Edgar Allan Poe. Members of a gastronomy club being killed one by one right after having their favorite dishes. These are just a few of the plots from L.F. Veríssimo’s novels. But what really makes them interesting to me are their narrative structures and the cultural artifacts that fuel them. Luis Fernando Veríssimo, one of the most celebrated and prolific Brazilian writers, is mostly known for his hundreds of humorous short stories and newspaper columns, collected in dozens of books starting in 1973.