‘Looking East and Looking West’: Crime Genre Conventions and Tropes

Abstract

Crimefiction travels well in translation; 1 it offers the reader a ‘convenient mix of the familiar and exotic’ 2 which may explain to some extent the mass appeal the genre has worldwide. This article charts the textual movements, specifically of key tropes of crime fiction, between (primarily Anglophone) Western and Chinese literary systems: moments of production, reception, translation and exchange which contribute to ‘advancing the genre’ 3 within and across specific cultural and literary contexts. In delineating instances in the evolution of what Brigid Maher has described as a globalised meta-genre, we draw on a wide range of texts and modes, in itself indicative of the hybrid and constantly evolving nature of the genre: English detective and American crime stories, traditional (Gong An) and modern (Zhen Tan) Chinese crime narratives, translations from English into Chinese and from Chinese into English, as well as contemporary Chinese TV adaptations of Gong An. The focus of discussion is on tracing patterns and developments rather than in-depth analysis of individual texts or translations. We will start by showing how the impact of Western narrative structures on a weakened literary system generated the Zhen Tan ,a new form of detective narrative in Chinese literary production after the key features of the modern Western detective story of ratiocination and suspensewereintroduced.Weexplainthemovementfromdomestication to adoption of foreign features in Chinese Sherlock Holmes translations in the context of resident traditions of Chinese Gong An crime narratives and move on to an exploration of English translations of Gong An, establishing domestication as a translation strategy for narrative structure, but foreignization in terms of selection of material and the evocation of an exotic, sexualized and feudal other. Finally, we examine two central tropes which emerged in the analysis of English Gong An