Transnational Crime Fiction

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 open access edited collection examines representations of human trafficking in media ranging from British and Serbian newspapers, British and Scandinavian crime novels, and a documentary series, and questions the extent to which these portrayals reflect the realities of trafficking. It tackles the problematic tendency to under-report particular types of victim and forms of trafficking, and seeks to explore both dominant and marginalised points of view. The authors take a cross-disciplinary approach, utilising analytical tools from across the humanities and social sciences, including linguistics, literary and media studies, and cultural criminology. It will appeal to students, academics and policy-makers with an interest in human trafficking and its depiction in the modern day.

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.

Taking up a neglected area in the study of the crime novel, this collection investigates the growing number of writers who adapt conventions of detective fiction to expose problems of law, ethics, and truth that arise in postcolonial and transnational communities. While detective fiction has been linked to imperialism and constructions of race from its earliest origins, recent developments signal the evolution of the genre into a potent framework for narrating the complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a postcolonial world. Among the authors considered are Vikram Chandra, Gabriel García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mario Vargas Llosa, Suki Kim, and Walter Mosley. The essays explore detective stories set in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and North America, including novels that view the American metropolis from the point of view of Asian American, African American, or Latino characters. Offering ten new and original essays by scholars in the field, this volume highlights the diverse employment of detective fictions internationally, and uncovers important political and historical subtexts of popular crime novels.

'The foreigner' is a familiar character in popular crime fiction, from the foreign detective whose outsider status provides a unique perspective on a familiar or exotic location to the xenophobic portrayal of the criminal 'other'. Exploring popular crime fiction from across the world, The Foreign in International Crime Fiction examines these popular works as 'transcultural contact zones' in which writers can tackle such issues as national identity, immigration, globalization and diaspora communities. Offering readings of 20th and 21st-century crime writing from Norway, the UK, India, China, Europe and Australasia, the essays in this book open up new directions for scholarship on crime writing and transnational literatures.

Reading texts from across the world, this book examines the depiction of ‘the foreigner' in popular 20th and 21st century crime writing.

Investigating Identities: Questions of Identity in Contemporary International Crime Fiction is one of the relatively few books to date which adopts a comparative approach to the study of the genre. This collection of twenty essays by international scholars, examining crime fiction production from over a dozen countries, confirms that a comparative approach can both shed light on processes of adaptation and appropriation of the genre within specific national, regional or local contexts, and also uncover similarities between the works of authors from very different areas. Contributors explore discourse concerning national and historical memory, language, race, ethnicity, culture and gender, and examine how identity is affirmed and challenged in the crime genre today. They reveal a growing tendency towards hybridization and postmodern experimentation, and increasing engagement with philosophical enquiry into the epistemological dimensions of investigation. Throughout, the notion of stable identities is subject to scrutiny. While each essay in itself is a valuable addition to existing criticism on the genre, all the chapters mutually inform and complement each other in fascinating and often unexpected ways. This volume makes an important contribution to the growing field of crime fiction studies and to ongoing debates on questions of identity. It will therefore be of special interest to students and scholars of the crime genre, identity studies and comparative literature. It will also appeal to all who enjoy reading contemporary crime fiction.

My dissertation, titled "Transnational Crime Fictions and Argentina's Criminal State," proposes a new understanding of the dictatorship novels of Ricardo Piglia, Juan José Saer, and Manuel Puig grounded in their shared appropriation from popular crime fiction. Across the 1940's, 50's, and 60's, a wide range of popular crime fiction was translated, written, theorized, printed and reprinted in Argentina, and these popular genres grew steadily in readership, visibility, and cultural legitimacy. These genres were largely dismissed as insipid forms of mass-culture entertainment by contemporary criticism, however, and their relevance has been downplayed by literary history to this day. My study of the novels of these influential authors restores this context in order to highlight their appropriations from these undervalued narrative traditions, in which they found incipient forms of social critique and unique modes of representing history and the social order. In three genre-focused studies, the dissertation maps out vernacular sources for these authors' formal experiments, linking a generational fixation on "active reading" to a contemporary reconsideration of sensationalism and melodrama; the problematics of historiography to the tenuous boundary between crime fiction and crime journalism; and, finally, the polemic psychoanalysis of violence to the unpleasures of the lurid psychological thriller. Beyond reconsidering one generation of Argentine literary history and its relationship to popular culture, this work also functions more generally as a case study in how avant-garde literature poaches forms from popular culture in order to access the imagination of "the masses". The dissertation begins with a brief pre-history of crime fiction in the work of Jorge Luis Borges and the generation immediately before that of Puig, Piglia, and Saer. Borges put one form of crime fiction at the heart of his epochal project for a speculative and "irreverent" modernism in the 1940's, yet emphatically rejected any other direct contact with mass culture. When the next generation challenged Borges' taboo on melodrama, they did so by shifting their focus from the least melodramatic forms of crime fiction to the most melodramatic ones. Thus, I focus on the forms of social critique particular to these melodramatic crime narratives, such as the spectularized martyrology of Puig's Boquitas pintadas, the small-town naturalism of Saer's Cicatrices, and the gendered sentiments of Piglia's early short fiction. These works are read against melodramatic intertexts that were being reprinted and reconsidered in that period: James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce, William Faulkner's Light in August, and Roberto Arlt's Los siete locos, respectively. Honing in on that boundary between fiction and journalism, the dissertation then plots out various conceptions of the author in true-crime fiction, creative non-fiction, and the more overtly polemic testimonio tradition against the backdrop of the Cold War. This entails a detailed consideration of the legacy of bridge-figure Rodolfo Walsh, whose populist works of crime-fiction and reportage redrew the boundaries between the literary and the popular spheres. I read Piglia's nostalgic and ironically testimonial Plata quemada (1999) as a working through of Walsh's legacy, updating his Cold War ethics of writerly veracity to the age of television and to the postdictatorial problematics of memory. Similarly, I read Puig's Beso de la mujer araña (1976), his Maldición eternal a quien lea estas páginas (1980), and Saer's Glosa (1986) as three distinct explorations of the readerly psychology of sensationalism and of the limits of testimonio. In these works, confession is considered as an inadequate mechanism for the memory work demanded of literature by post-dictatorial society. Finally, the dissertation attempts to provide a tentative theory and genealogy of the three psychological dictatorship thrillers written by Puig, Piglia and Saer, constitutively marked by readerly affects of paranoia, doubt, and menace. Drawing from Piglia's evolving definitions of "paranoid fiction" and its generically diverse sources, I frame these thrillers as affective-manipulative hybrid texts responding to the historiographical impasse of totalitarianism. Starting with Puig's prescient psychoanalytic thriller, The Buenos Aires Affair (1969), I look to Hitchcock's Freudianism and the vernacular of the thriller as sources for a tradition, beginning with Puig, of psychopathologizing Argentine fascism. I consider Piglia's Respiración artificial (1980) not only as a novelistic critique of psychological and linguistic transparency, but also as modernist form of thriller following Puig's lead. Saer's novelistic representation of life under the menace of totalitarian violence, Nadie nada nunca (1980), is an equally hybrid of diverse cultural narratives structured by a rhetoric of aporia, combining high philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the most base pop-culture fantasies as equally inadequate approaches to the psychopathology of the criminal State. These polemical experiments in the limits of narrative representation are the culmination of a generational project of historiographical and novelistic experiment, the scope, scale, and importance of which fails to come into view without a restoration of the cultural context of their production and an expansion of the purview of literary studies.

Accessible yet comprehensive, this first systematic account of crime fiction across the globe offers a deep and thoroughly nuanced understanding of the genre's transnational history. Offering a lucid account of the major theoretical issues and comparative perspectives that constitute world crime fiction, this book introduces readers to the international crime fiction publishing industry, the translation and circulation of crime fiction, international crime fiction collections, the role of women in world crime fiction, and regional forms of crime fiction. It also illuminates the past and present of crime fiction in various supranational regions across the world, including East and South Asia, the Arab World, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Scandinavia, as well as three spheres defined by a shared language, namely the Francophone, Lusophone, and Hispanic worlds. Thoroughly-researched and broad in scope, this book is as valuable for general readers as for undergraduate and postgraduate students of popular fiction and world literature.

The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction is a comprehensive introduction to crime fiction and crime fiction scholarship today. Across 45 original chapters, specialists in the field offer innovative approaches to the classics of the genre as well as ground-breaking mappings of emerging themes and trends. The volume is divided into three parts. Part I, Approaches, rearticulates the key theoretical questions posed by the crime genre. Part II, Devices, examines the textual characteristics of crime fiction. Part III, Interfaces investigates the complex ways in which crime fiction engages with the defining issues of its context – from policing and forensic science through war, migration and narcotics to digital media and the environment. Rigorously argued and engagingly written, the volume is indispensable both to students and scholars of crime fiction.