Focusing on Leonardo Padura Fuentes's hard-boiled fiction, this essay traces the origin and evolution of the genre in Cuba. Padura Fuentes has challenged the officially sanctioned socialist "literatura policial" that became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. creating a new model of criticism that is not afraid to confront the island's socio-economic problems. This article analyzes how in this novelist's tetralogy, the dominating rhetoric is one of scarcity, and how this constant state of lacking builds on the formulaic elements of the detective genre to reveal a social reality where crime (and its resolution) do not always have to do with the discovery of a dead body.