This book explores the vast array of animals that populate detective fiction. If the genre begins, as is widely supposed, with Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), then detective fiction’s very first culprit is an animal. Animals, moreover, consistently appear as victims, clues, and companions, while the abstract conception of animality is closely tied to the idea of criminality. Although it is often described as an essentially conservative form, detective fiction can unsettle the binary of human and animal to intersect with developing concerns in animal studies: animal agency, the ethical complexities of human/animal interaction, the politics and literary aesthetics of violence, and animal metaphor. Gathering its 14 essays into sections on ontologies, ethics, politics, and forms, Animals in Detective Fiction provides a compelling and nuanced analysis of the central role creatures play in this enduringly popular and continually morphing literary form.
Author(s): Ruth Hawthorn, John Miller
Series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 310
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Origins and Evolutions: The Brutal History of Detective Fiction
Origins
Evolutions
Animals in Detective Fiction
Works Cited
Ontologies
Tigers, Criminals, Rogues: Animality in Dickens’ Detective Fiction
Tigers and Rogues
Animal Expressions
Animals before the Law
Works Cited
Quantum Entanglements in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles
Works Cited
Wolverines, Werewolves and Demon Dogs: Animality, Criminality and Classification in James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet
“Werewolf Murder”: Identity, Monstrosity and “Otherness” in The Black Dahlia
The “Wolverine Monster”: Destabilising the Human–Animal Binary
Works Cited
Ethics
The Psittacine Witness: Parrot Talk and Animal Ethics in Earl Derr Biggers’ The Chinese Parrot and Earl Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Perjured Parrot
Enlightenment Parrots
Grief and Race in The Chinese Parrot
The Logic of the Commodity in The Case of the Perjured Parrot
Conclusion
Works Cited
Ecology, Capability and Companion Species: Conflicting Ethics in Nevada Barr’s Blood Lure
Conventions and Policies
Ecological Ethics and the Image of the Species
Capability Ethics and the Image of Fear
Companion Species Ethics and the Image of Brother Bear
Discussion and Conclusion
Works Cited
Laboratory Tech-Noir: Genre, Narrative Form, and the Literary Model Organism in Jay Hosking’s Three Years with the Rat
Grace, 2006: The Model Organism, Scientific Epistemology, and Mystery
John, 2007: Corporeal Equivalence and Empathy
Buddy, 2008: Beyond Laboratory Labour as Model Organism Agency
The Other Side: Sacrificial Companionship and Mourning
Works Cited
Reptiles, Buddhism, and Detection in John Burdett’s Bangkok 8
Introduction
Ethics and Orientalism
Detection, Animal Reincarnation, Karma
Bangkok 8 and Reptiles
Enlightened Detection
Conclusions
Works Cited
Politics
Animals, Biopolitics, and Sensation Fiction: M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret
Works Cited
“The Motto of the Mollusc”: Patricia Highsmith and the Semiotics of Snails
Snail Watching: Highsmith and the Tradition of Animals in Detective Stories
Living to Build One’s House: The Value of Snails in Deep Water
Coda: The Mollusc Lives On
Works Cited
“Before the white man came, when animals still talked”: Colonial Creatures in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer and Adrian C. Louis’s Skins
Introduction: We Are All Animals
“The tree grows heavy with owls”: Animal Mythology in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer
“Remember, human beings don’t control anything. Spirits do”: Trickster Discourse in Adrian C. Louis’s Skins
Conclusion: We Will Always Be Animals
Works Cited
Forms
Aping the Classics: Terry Pratchett’s Satirical Animals and Detective Fiction
I: “The Curious Incident of the Orang-utan in the Night-time”
II: The Rats’ Chamber and Animals as Metaphor
III: The Werewolf and the Monkey-Brain: Beyond the Binary
IV: Conclusions
Works Cited
Animal Image and Human Logos in Graphic Detective Fiction
Theriocephalic Detectives: Animal Image in Blacksad and Grandville
Hermeneutic Animals: Human Logos in Graphic Detective Fiction
Works Cited
“As easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket”: Animetaphor in Raymond Chandler and Jonathan Lethem
Chandler’s Noir Animals
Lethem’s Evolved Animals
The Nietzschean Animal and Anthropocene Noir
Works Cited
Index
