Crime Files

Focusing on contemporary crime narratives from different parts of the world, this collection of essays explores the mobility of crimes, criminals and investigators across social, cultural and national borders. The essays argue that such border crossings reflect on recent sociocultural transformations and geopolitical anxieties to create an image of networked and interconnected societies where crime is not easily contained. The book further analyses crime texts’ wider sociocultural and affective significance by examining the global mobility of the genre itself across cultures, languages and media. Underlining the global reach and mobility of the crime genre, the collection analyses types and representations of mobility in literary and visual crime narratives, inviting comparisons between texts, crimes and mobilities in a geographically diverse context. The collection ultimately understands mobility as an object of study and a critical lens through which transformations in our globalised world can be examined.

This book aims to establish the position of the sidekick character in the crime and detective fiction literary genres. It re-evaluates the traditional view that the sidekick character in these genres is often overlooked as having a small, generic or singular role—either to act as the foil to the detective in order to accentuate their own abilities at solving crimes, or else to simply tell the story to the reader. Instead, essays in the collection explore the representations and functions of the detective’s sidekick across a range of forms and subgenres of crime fiction. By incorporating forms such as children’s detective fiction, comics and graphic novels and film and television alongside the more traditional fare of novels and short stories, this book aims to break down the boundaries that sometimes exist between these forms, using the sidekick as a defining thread to link them together into a wider conceptual argument that covers a broad range of crime narratives.

Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction offers an overview of the ways in which the past is brought back to the surface and influences the present in British detective fiction written between 1920 and 2020. Exploring a range of authors including Agatha Christie, Patricia Wentworth, Val McDermid, Sarah Caudwell, Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Dunnett, Jonathan Stroud and Ben Aaronovitch, Lisa Hopkins argues that both the literal and literary disinterment of the past use elements of the national past to interrogate the present. As such, in the texts discussed, uncovering the truth about an individual crime is also typically an uncovering of a more general connection between the present and the past.  Whether detective novels explore murders on archaeological digs, hauntings, cold crimes or killings at Christmas, Hopkins explores the underlying message that you cannot understand the present unless you understand the past.

British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965: Facts and Fictions conceptualizes detective fiction as an archive, i. e., a trove of documents and sources to be used for historical interpretation. By framing the genre as a shifting set of values, definitions, and practices, the book historicizes the contested meanings of analytical categories like class, race, gender, nation, and empire that have been applied to the forms and functions of detection. Three organizing themes structure this investigation: fictive facticity, genre fluidity, and conservative modernity. This volume thus shows how British detective fiction from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century both shaped and was shaped by its social, cultural, and political contexts and the lived experience of its authors and readers at critical moments in time.

Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction examines questions of truth and relativism, turning to detectives, both real and imagined, from Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Robert Mueller, to establish an oblique history of the path from a world where not believing in truth was unthinkable to the present, where it is common to believe that objective truth is a remnant of a simpler, more naïve time. Examining detective stories both literary and popular including hard-boiled, postmodern, and twenty-first century novels, the book establishes that examining detective fiction allows for a unique view of this progression to post-truth since the detective’s ultimate job is to take the reader from doubt to belief. David Riddle Watson shows that objectivity is intersubjectivity, arguing that the belief in multiple worlds is ultimately what sustains the illusion of relativism.

This book analyses the gender roles and political contexts of spy fiction narratives published during the years of the Cold War. It offers an introduction to the development of spy fiction both in England and in the United States and explores the ways in which issues such as the atomic bomb, double agents, paranoia, propaganda and megalomania manifest themselves within the genre. The book examines the ongoing marginalization of women within spy fiction texts, exploring the idea that this unique period in global history is responsible for the active promotion and celebration of masculinity and male superiority. From James Bond to Jason Bourne, the book evaluates the ongoing enforcement of patriarchal ideas and oppressions that, in the name of national security and patriotic duty, have contributed to the development of a genre in which discrimination and bias continue to dominate.

Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison examines Christie’s female poisoners in the context of Christie’s own experience in pharmacy and of detective fiction. In doing so, it uncovers an overlooked dynamic in which female poisoners deliver well-deserved comeuppance for gendered and classed wrongdoing ordinarily accepted in everyday life. While critics have long recognized male outlaws, like Robin Hood, who use crime to oppose a corrupt system, this book contends that female outlaws – witches and poisoners – offer a similar heritage of empowered femininity. Far from cozy and formulaic, Agatha Christie’s outlaw poisoners offer readers the surprising pleasures of comeuppance, and they set the stage for contemporary detective fiction writers, more recent films depicting poisoning as empowering, and even poison gardens, which are tourist destinations that offer visitors the guilty pleasure of poison.

This book represents the first extended consideration of contemporary crime fiction as a European phenomenon. Understanding crime fiction in its broadest sense, as a transmedia practice, and offering unique insights into this practice in specific European countries and as a genuinely transcontinental endeavour, this book argues that the distinctiveness of the form can be found in its related historical and political inquiries. It asks how the genre’s excavation of Europe’s history of violence and protest in the twentieth century is informed by contemporary political questions. It also considers how the genre’s progressive reimagining of new identities forged at the crossroads of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality is offset by its bleaker assessment of the corrosive effects of entrenched social inequalities, political corruption, and state violence. The result is a rich, vibrant collection that shows how crime fiction can help us better understand the complex relationship between Europe’s past, present, and future. 

Seven chapters are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link. springer. com. 

Food, Consumption, and Masculinity in American Hardboiled Fiction draws on three related bodies of knowledge: crime fiction criticism, masculinity studies, and the cultural analysis of food and consumption practices from a critical eating studies perspective. In particular, this book focuses on food as an analytical category in the study of tough masculinity as represented in American hardboiled fiction. Through an examination of six American novels: Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, Leigh Brackett's No Good from a Corpse, Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place, Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, and Rex Stout's Champagne for One, this book shows how these novels reflect the gradual process of redefining consumption and consumerism in America, which traditionally has been coded as feminine. Marta Usiekniewicz shows that food and eating also reflect power relations and larger social and economic structures connected to class, gender, geography, sexuality, and ability, to name just a few.

From Sherlock Holmes onwards, fictional detectives use lenses: Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction argues that these visual aids are metaphors for ways of seeing, and that they help us to understand not only individual detectives’ methods but also the kinds of cultural work detective fiction may do.  It is sometimes regarded as a socially conservative form, and certainly the enduring popularity of ‘Golden Age’ writers such as Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Marsh implies a strong element of nostalgia in the appeal of the genre.  The emphasis on visual aids, however, suggests that solving crime is not a simple matter of uncovering truth but a complex, sophisticated and inherently subjective process, and thus challenges any sense of comforting certainties.  Moreover, the value of eye-witness testimony is often troubled in detective fiction by use of the phrase ‘the ocular proof’, whose origin in Shakespeare’s Othello reminds us that Othello is manipulated by Iago into misinterpreting what he sees.  The act of seeing thus comes to seem ideological and provisional, and Lisa Hopkins argues that the kind of visual aid selected by each detective is an index of his particular propensities and biases.

In versus narratives Sherlock Holmes is fighting or otherwise engaging Jack the Ripper. These texts pit the archetypal detective against the archetypal serial killer using established formulas as well as new narrative and generic features, a combination that results in their mass appeal among authors and audiences alike. The list of primary sources includes 120 titles – novels, short stories, plays, fanfiction, ‘Grand Game’ studies, movies, TV shows, video and board games – which are treated as a dialogic network of transfictional and transmedial texts. This study unpacks the versus corpus in its media dispersal by analysing Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper as serial figures and culture-texts emphasising the increasing palimpsestousness of the former and the multidirectional polymorphousness of the latter, and tracing the overlapping Doylean culture-text. It also addresses the way character constellations are represented, negotiated, and fed back into the versus network, contextualising them within the coalescence of fact and fiction, Gothic and crime fiction frames, cultural memory, neo-Victorianism, and biofiction.