Two poets vanish into the Sonoran desert. The middle section of the novel consists of testimony from dozens of people across twenty years who encountered them. Bolano published it in 1998 and won the Romulo Gallegos Prize, the most important award in Spanish-language fiction. Where 2666 is about horror, The Savage Detectives is about youth, poetry, and the slow discovery that your heroes were not what you thought.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.