The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction

Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: New directions in crime fiction scholarship
Bibliography
Part I Approaches
1 Genre
Classic definitions
Hybridity and mobility
Transnationalising crime fiction
Vanishing borders in Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer
Conclusion
Bibliography
2 Counterhistories and prehistories
The canonisation of detective fiction
From detective fiction to crime fiction
Every prehistory is a counterhistory
Changing paradigms of detection in Hamlet
Bibliography
3 The crime fiction series
Serial narrative structures
Serial infrastructures
Seriality unbound
Bibliography
4 Crime fiction in the marketplace
The international book trade
The international market for crime fiction
The crime fiction market in action: Jane Harper’s The Dry
Conclusion
Bibliography
5 Adaptations
Crime adaptation criticism
Theories of crime adaptation
Detective Byomkesh Bakshi!
Conclusion
Bibliography
6 Hybridisation
The hybridisation of crime fiction
Hybridisation and the expansion of the genre
Testing boundaries: Larsson and Nordic noir
Lafferty’s genre-bending exploration of crime in space
Globalisation and hybridisation
Crime fiction at the boundaries
Bibliography
7 Graphic crime novels
The medium of graphic novels
Medium and message
Conclusion
Bibliography
8 World literature
Crime fiction is world literature in an entangled world
Crime fiction is world literature that gains by generic reproducibility
Henning Mankell’s Wallander series as world literature
Bibliography
9 Translation
Translation and the development of national traditions
Translation strategies and editorial policies
Judge Dee in international circulation
Translation effects and genre-specific challenges
Note
Bibliography
10 Transnationality
Crime fiction as transnational literature
The detective, the crime, the reader and the brand
Transnationality in Andrea Camilleri’s The Snack Thief
Note
Bibliography
11 Gender and sexuality
Gendering the genre / gender in the genre
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison (1930)
Detecting desire
Conclusion
Bibliography
12 Race and ethnicity
Dominant images
Transnational and postcolonial renderings
Entanglement and muddledness – South African post-apartheid crime fiction
Re-visiting race and ethnicity: Entanglement and transnationalism in Cobra (2014)
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
13 Coloniality and decoloniality
Crime novel and the empire
Plotting decoloniality
Colonial Bengal and the rise of Goyenda (detective) fiction
Promoda
Notes
Bibliography
14 Psychoanalysis
Details in detection
Letters in circulation
Holmes’s misdirected reading
Transference in reading
Bibliography
Part II Devices
15 Murders
Scholarship and the occasional murder
Murder in crime fiction as a world literature
Murder as a clue to a greater crime – Cheng Xiaoqing’s “The Shoe”
Fictional murder, true crimes and terminal legibility
Bibliography
16 Victims
Puzzle and purity
Identifying the body
Beyond the Golden Age and the page
Detectives, victims and society
Bibliography
17 Detectives
The amateur detective
The private detective
Detection and diversity
The police detective
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Bibliography
18 Criminals
Constructing criminals
Accessing criminal mind(style)s
Val McDermid’s Mermaids Singing
Conclusion
Bibliography
19 Beginnings and endings
Endings versus the whole text
Beginnings versus the whole text
Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party (1988)
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
20 Plotting
The influence of Trent’s Last Case
Agatha Christie’s plotting techniques
The A.B.C Murders
Ambiguous evidence and multiple solutions
Accretion
Post-Golden Age plotting
Bibliography
21 Clues
Aspects of the clue
The case of the readable hat
Beyond the clue
Notes
Bibliography
22 Realism
Object and psychological realism
Hardboiled realism?
Bodyguard: Realism in the court of public opinion
Conclusion: Realism or verisimilitude
Bibliography
23 Place
Reading geographically
Place as national allegory
Unstable places in Teresa Solana’s A Not So Perfect Crime (2008)
Places of reading
Note
Bibliography
24 Time and space
Mapping detective fiction
Plotting a vaster crime
Henry Chang’s Chinatown
Bibliography
25 Self-referentiality and metafiction
And/or?
A Golden Age monopoly?
The metanarrative in the library
A shift in application
Bibliography
26 Paratextuality
Paratexts as methodological approach
Paratextual validation
Authenticity by paratext
Notes
Bibliography
27 Affect
Noir’s elusiveness
Theorising noir affect
Noir time and space
Nightmare Alley as noir affect
Conclusion
Bibliography
28 Alterity and the Other
If looks could kill: Judging the Other by appearance
The detective as Other
Laughing it off: Humour as Othering device
The killer as Other and same: James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux
Notes
Bibliography
29 Digital technology
Hackers, social media and speculative fiction
The digital forensic
The Steel Kiss and the price of security
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part III Interfaces
30 Crime fiction and criminology
Classical criminology, positivist criminology, sociological criminology
Criminology in crime fiction: Nineteenth century to the present
Labelling a criminal, making a criminal
Criminology and contemporary crime fiction
Bibliography
31 Crime fiction and theories of justice
Hardboiled crime fiction
Theories of punishment
Rehabilitating justice
Notes
Bibliography
32 Crime fiction and modern science
Cuvier and the reconstructive sciences
Forensics and the scientific police
Optics and physics
Mastery and doubt
Twentieth-century noir
Science today
Reconstructive science and Vargas’s The Three Evangelists
Bibliography
33 Crime fiction and the police
Types of police officer
Realism, melodrama and the divided detective
Conclusion
Bibliography
34 Crime fiction and memory
Memory and amnesia
Memory and history
Memory in Chilean crime fiction
Ramón Díaz Eterovic and the Heredia series
Memory in the future
Bibliography
35 Crime fiction and trauma
Crime fiction and trauma theory
Layers of trauma and the politics of narrative
Bibliography
36 Crime fiction and politics
The politics of form
The politics of content
The politics of Spanish crime fiction: Southern Seas
Conclusion
Bibliography
37 Crime fiction and the city
Crime in the city: The degraded mass
The city crowd, the urban detective
Golden Age and hardboiled: The threatening city
The police procedural: The multiple city
Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games
Note
Bibliography
38 Crime fiction and war
Colliding genres
Crime fiction and war stories
Wartime crime scenes
Conclusion
Bibliography
39 Crime fiction and global capital
Primitive accumulation and (economic) death
The globalisation of capital, crime and fiction
Individual crimes, global systems: Or the human consequences of accumulation
Conclusion
Bibliography
40 Crime fiction and the environment
Ecocritical approaches to crime fiction and the environment
Roberto Ampuero’s El alemán de Atacama
Environmental crime: Crime fiction in the spotlight
Bibliography
41 Crime fiction and narcotics
Drugs, colonialism and addiction
Narcoepics and the ethics of not seeing
The drugs trade and the social and territorial expansion of capitalism
Conclusion
Bibliography
42 Crime fiction and migration
Migration in crime fiction: The politics of representation
Eva Dolan’s Long Way Home
Extending the genre
Bibliography
43 Crime fiction and authoritarianism
Crime fiction and Latin American dictatorships
Crime fiction in communist countries
Daniel Chavarría’s Joy
Notes
Bibliography
44 Crime fiction and digital media
The digital age and transmedia storytelling
Digital crime texts and transmediality
Miss Fisher in the digital maze
Concluding thoughts
Notes
Bibliography
45 Crime fiction and the future
Crime fiction and science fiction: The contact zones
Speculating the city: China Miéville detecting the future
Going global: Science fiction and crime fiction in troubled times
Bibliography
Index