Racism, Violence and Identity

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Although I am aware that the right expression should be ‘minority ethnic’, the established critical convention is to speak of ‘ethnic detective(s)’ or ‘ethnic crime fiction’. 2. Some relevant academic titles in this respect are: Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction (1991) by Frankie Y Bailey; The Ethnic Detective: Chester Himes, Harry Kemelman, Tony Hillerman (1992) by Peter Freese; The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Class (2001) by Andrew Pepper; Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction by Maureen T Reddy (2002); Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction (2003 Fisher-Hornung , Dorothea and Monika Mueller Sleuthing Ethnicity. The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction . London : Associated Presses , 2003 . [Google Scholar]) edited by Dorothea Fisher-Hornung and Monika Mueller; Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (2004 Gilroy, Paul. 2004. After Empire. Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) by Stephen Thomas Knight; and Chicano Detective Fiction: A Critical Study Of Five Novelists (2005) by Susan Baker Sotelo. 3. Jean-Christophe Grangé, Jakob Arjouni and Francisco Zamora have created ‘ethnic’ detectives, an Arab, a Turk and a Guinean respectively, but they only appear in one novel each. 4. There is also Alexander McCall Smith and his series on Ma Ramotswe, the Botswana lady detective, but I would not include her among the order of ‘ethnic’ detectives, because all her adventures take place in her native Botswana, where she would not qualify as ‘minority ethnic’. 5. Phillips's two other crime novels, The Dancing Face (1997 Hall , Stuart . ‘ Old and New Ethnicities, Old and New Identities ’. Culture, Globalization and the World System. Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity . Anthony King . Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P , 1997 . 41 – 68 . [Google Scholar]) and A Shadow of Myself (2001), do not feature Sam Dean as the protagonist. 6. The analysis of this novel offered by Dave Gunning is exemplary in his juxtaposition of Phillips's political views and his literary practice. 7. These are some of the features that the editors of Sleuthing Ethnicity underline as characteristic of the ‘ethnic’ detective. Peter Freese defines the ‘ethnic’ detective as an investigator belonging ‘to a community whose history, values and way of life differ from those of the so-called mainstream’ and whose cases turn into ‘an illustration of ethnic friction and cultural confrontation and thus into a comment on the challenges of everyday life in a “multicultural” society’ (quoted in Matzke and Mühleisen 6). 8. The number of mixed couples who appear in the Sam Dean novels should be noted; Dean has been married to a white woman and he has several affairs with white women throughout all the novels. His sexual prowess is clearly an aspect in which Dean never fails to comply with the expectations of his white lovers. In fact, I find an element of self-conscious humour and irony in the way Phillips portrays Dean's masculinity, but do not have the space to go into this theme here. Patricia Plummer also argues that Dean's ‘way with the ladies’ is ‘exaggerated to the point that it becomes a parody of male fantasies’ (Plummer 261). In any case, love and sex seem to be privileged and informal spaces of conviviality for Phillips's characters and particularly for Dean himself. 9. Some outstanding examples in this respect are Le Carré's The Constant Gardener (2001 Phillips Mike . A Shadow of Myself . London : Harper Collins , 2001 . [Google Scholar]), Leon's Blood from a Stone (2009), Mankell's The Man from Beiging (2011) and Lozano's El caso Sankara (2006).