Crime Fiction as World Literature ed. by Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Crime Fiction as World Literature ed. by Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen Eric Sandberg Nilsson, Louise, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen, eds. Crime Fiction as World Literature. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Pp. vii+301. US$135.00 hardcover, US$32.35 paperback, US$28.88 ebook. It is something of a critical commonplace-or perhaps it would be better to say a rhetorical flourish-to bemoan the scholarly neglect of crime fiction. This is a genre that is, as the editors of Crime Fiction as World Literature, Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen, point out, “a significant participant in the international sphere of world literature” (2), and one that is both hugely popular and tightly entangled with elite literary production (3). Crime fiction, on the one hand, accounts for seven of the top ten most frequently borrowed authors in the British Public library system, at least of works intended for adult consumption, such as James Patterson and Agatha Christie, both of whom appear on the list (“Most Borrowed”). It is, on the other hand, closely associated with high-culture figures such as Umberto Eco, whose 1983 The Name of the Rose is an overt detective novel with a protagonist, William of Baskerville, directly linked to the most famous figure in the genre, and Jorge Luis Borges, who continued and extended Edgar Allan Poe’s groundbreaking exploration of the genre’s potentials in stories such as “Death and the Compass.” Crime fiction thus clearly deserves the sustained attention of literary scholars. To be fair, despite the ritualistic complaints of crime fiction scholars-and I am as guilty as any in this regard-the genre has received a fair measure of attention. On “crime-novel-ridden campuses,” as the editors note, scholars are working hard, and have been for some years now, to understand the genre’s popularity (2–3), not to mention its particular aesthetic effects, its entanglement with modern technologies [End Page 433] and ideologies, its relationship to questions of race, gender, and sexuality, and much more. There are now several scholarly journals dedicated to the study of crime fiction, including the venerable McFarland publication Clues and the newly-launched Crime Fiction Studies from Edinburgh University Press, and the number of monographs and edited collections published annually in the field easily reaches double digits. This is, admittedly, a sparse academic crop when compared to the superabundance of work dedicated to, say, Virginia Woolf-or, of course, modernism more generally -but it certainly represents more scholarly interest than is accorded to some other forms of popular fiction-romance, for instance, or the spy novel. The editors of Crime Fiction as World Literature have, however, identified an important exception to this rule. “To date,” they note, “studies of crime fiction have largely been confined to individual national or at most regional traditions” (3). This means that the “complex, overlapping disjunctive networks and sub-networks” (3) within which crime fiction is created and read in a global context tend to be ignored. Consider, for example, the way a Japanese police procedural, inspired both by American generic models and an indigenous crime writing tradition, might be influenced, both in terms of composition, distribution, and reception, by the global success of, say, Scandinavian Noir, yet remain in other ways a resolutely local cultural artefact responding to and shaped by Japanese linguistic and cultural norms. This process of intersecting local and global factors gains another level of complexity when the resulting work is translated into English or another global language, and marketed internationally. Nilsson, Damrosch, and D’haen also point to the undue prominence regularly, indeed almost inevitably, given to British and American crime writing. Peter Messent’s The Crime Fiction Handbook, mentioned here in this context, may well be, as I believe, the single best introductory volume on the subject currently available, but it is true that of the fourteen key works to which Messent dedicates an individual chapter, all but two are from Britain and America. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s The Laughing Policeman and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are the exceptions-both...