Crime Fiction Research Articles

British Detective Fiction 1891-1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes, by Clare Clarke

Reviewed by: British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes by Clare Clarke Caroline Reitz (bio) British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes, by Clare Clarke; pp. xi + 166. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $74.99, $59.99 ebook. Clare Clarke’s British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes begins like any good detective story: with a missing person. That person is Sherlock Holmes, who died tumbling over Reichenbach Falls with archnemesis Professor Moriarity in “The Final Problem” (1893). Clarke examines six different authors who published detective fiction during “The Great Hiatus,” the decade between Holmes’s fall and Arthur Conan Doyle’s revival of the Great Detective in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2). Focusing on this decade allows Clarke to explore the colorful characters who stepped through the Sherlock-shaped hole. More importantly, the book adds to an ongoing critical correction. Scholarly work on the genre has been theorized disproportionately around the Sherlock Holmes canon. Clarke persuasively and engagingly makes the case that stories that “enjoyed widespread circulation . . . but . . . did not conform to later-decided rules of the genre” allow us to see “what the post-Sherlock fin-de-siècle detective narrative could be and do” (7–8). While some of these stories and series are derivative of Holmes (from archnemeses, to vulnerable female clients, to twelve story collections), and while Holmes is frequently invoked in reviews and marketing as both yardstick and lure, some of these stories represent a real departure in character and tone, including a female Romany pawnbroker, a ghost detective fighting man-eating plants on the “blurry boundaries” of the detective story, and an amoral detective-cum-murderer (150). These innovations challenge some sacred ideas about the genre, such as the immunity of detectives, the American origin of hardboiled detective fiction, and the conservative cultural work that the whodunnit allegedly provides. This book is a sequel of sorts to Clarke’s earlier and excellent Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (2014); like that text, it balances close readings of significant overlooked figures with a broad overview of historical and publication contexts. Indeed, if recovery anthologies have been organized around gender or nationality (for example, Nick Rennison’s Sherlock’s Sisters: Stories from the Golden Age of the Female Detective [2020] or LeRoy Lad Panek and Mary M. Bendel-Simso’s Early American Detective Stories: An Anthology [2014]), Clarke is “particularly eager to uncover the lesser-known places and the publications in which late-Victorian British readers consumed detective fiction” (154). Clarke’s attention to the original publication (and republication) of these stories in regional weekly and daily newspapers is a tremendously useful addition to our [End Page 689] understanding of the popular fiction of this period. As Clarke writes, we are familiar with the “well-known account of white-collar London middle-class male workers on their commuter trains reading sixpenny or shilling monthlies, like the Strand,” the home of Sherlock (154). But regional newspapers outnumbered and outsold London publications from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1950s. An eager cadre of writers emerged (think George Gissing’s 1891 New Grub Street) to meet a newly literate reading public and drew their topics from a late-nineteenth-century culture anxious about scientific discoveries, shifting gender roles, imperial expansion, urban poverty, and religious crises. Noting that she “simply [wrote] to order,” L. T. Meade’s complicated female criminals replaced Holmes in the Strand (1891–1950) and ticked several of those boxes (qtd. in Clarke 16). While Madame Koluchy and Madame Sara are perhaps the most well-known of Clarke’s subjects, her chapter on Meade goes beyond showing the ways in which femme fatales are brought to heel by the middle-class masculine professional competence of scientists, lawyers, and police. These stories, Clarke notes, feature strong secondary female characters, including a New Woman journalist, a bacteriologist’s assistant, and a woman brought in to assist Scotland Yard who is like a “bloodhound when she scents the prey” (32). Popular fiction at the end of the century is a fertile ground for female characters. C. L. Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke, frequently compared to Sherlock...

Investigating the Canon: The Reader as Detective in Reworkings of Madame Bovary and Jane Eyre

Since the 1990s, a trend towards adapting, rewriting, or otherwise engaging with the literary canon—especially the nineteenth-century novel—via the popular genre of crime fiction may be observed in both French and English. Taking as its main examples Jasper Fforde’s 2001 novel <em>The Eyre Affair</em> and Philippe Doumenc’s <em>Contre-enquête sur la mort d’Emma Bovary</em> (2009), this article considers what is special about crime-fiction engagements with the literary canon and how they differ from other types of adaptation, in particular in the use of the central detective figure as a proxy for the position of the reader. Crime fiction and its subgenres—here, the whodunit and hard-boiled thriller—is a transnational genre which readily adapts itself to local contexts. I argue that both Doumenc and Fforde adapt their chosen genres in order to explore the nature and purpose of their respective national canons. Following a detailed analysis of the role of the reader–detective in each text, the article goes on to demonstrate how both texts engage in theoretical debates on canonicity, including questions of authorial genius, aesthetic value, and the pleasure of reading. By emphasising the position of a skilled non-academic reader, familiar with the codes and conventions of both “high” literature and genre fiction, crime fiction reworkings offer a non-hierarchical approach to the literary canon, presented as part of a shared cultural property and, above all, a source of enjoyment. However, while they acknowledge aspects of literary theory and academic debate, their orientation towards a mass-market audience and the conventions of their genre may also lead them to side-step the overt political engagement of recent academic debates on the canon.

Unravelling imaginative heritage.

This paper focuses on media tourism - people travelling to places associated with film, TV-series, games or other forms of popular culture. In order to investigate the roles and impacts of the multiple stakeholders that are involved in this booming phenomenon, the concept ‘imaginative heritage’ is introduced. In particular, we refer to the multitude of popular, fictional narratives that have been projected upon or appropriated by specific sites throughout time and that together make up an important part of local place identity. As is argued here, imaginative heritage results from an active involvement of not only locals, fans and tourists, but also the media industries, the tourism industries and the local governments. By applying this concept to cases of crime fiction tourism and addressing the power configurations behind these heritage and tourism practices, this paper aims to contribute to a more holistic understanding of media tourism and, more in particular, the reciprocal nature of the relation between popular crime fiction, heritage and place.

Blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction: serial killers in the context of dark tourism

Serial killers fascinate people and books, films, TV series and other types of entertainment increasingly cater to this interest providing sensationalized media coverage. The theory suggests that the boundaries are blurred considerably between fact and fiction, even for the serial killers themselves. For many people, serial killers are both frightening and attractive enough to motivate them to go on tours and visit sites, museums and other attractions that are associated with them. This paper explores the motivation for consuming true and fictional crime including murders and serial killing with an emphasis on literature, films, TV series as well as tourism. A content analysis of the websites of walking tours, museums and other attractions connected to fictional and real serial killers was undertaken, as well as a questionnaire with a niche sample of respondents who commented on their experience and perceptions of serial killers within a dark tourism context. The results suggest that while tourists tend to prefer real serial killers to fictional ones, only a small number of tourists actually engage in this form of dark tourism. Their motivations tend to be more connected to education or entertainment rather than a morbid obsession with death or tragedy.

Chinese Killer King: trespassing the boundaries of crime fiction and Cantonese literature

ABSTRACT This essay introduces readers to a Cantonese writer, editor, and director, Yam Wu-Fa/Ren Huhua (?-1976), whose creative life peaked between the 1930s and the 1950s among a Cantonese-speaking readership across the Pacific. Pertinent to our discussion is his crime fiction series, Chinese Killer King (zhongguo sharenwang). The Killer King, “Charlie Chiu”—not to be confused with Earl Derr Biggers’s “Charlie Chan”—is a Cantonese borderland hero who derives from various references, both fictional and historical, addressing a cosmopolitan yet Cantonese imaginary. Overlooked, Yam and his works represent more than the marginalisation that is commonly experienced by Southernly “popular fictions” in a histography under an elitist and Shanghai-Beijing-centric framework. Chinese Killer King challenges the kind of place-bound identity politics evident in today’s discussion on Hong Kong literature and Sinophone writings. The author hence explores the possibility of using “Cantonese literature” as a critical framework to historicise and theorise a Cantonese-ness and its border-crossing dimension and discusses how the series may be positioned among world crime fictions.

The Culinary Space: Food as a Narrative Tool in Agatha Christie’s Detective Novels

Kevin Burton Smith in his article ‘Murder on the Menu’ (2010), comments, “right from the start there’s been a curious link between food (and drink) and crime fiction.” Despite the fact that culinary mystery novels arose as a subgenre of crime fiction in the late twentieth century, food has always been a part of crime fiction, and has played an important role in the early stories of Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe. Food is frequently depicted as a source of stability and order in crime novels, establishing verisimilitude, creating a genuine world, a world as we know it. Agatha Christie, too, has included significant reference to food, eating habits and food rituals throughout her detective stories, using it as a tool to create a feminine and domestic space. This paper will analyse how Christie has used the depiction of food as a tool to further the narrative, portraying it in her novels as a calming ritual and a clue to the murder. However, food in Christie’s stories can also gain a more sinister undertone, and this paper will also analyse this, focusing on how Christie transforms food into a murder weapon itself, as a bad omen indicating events, thereby, blending reality with the storyline and lending vivacity to her characters and her plots.

Application of Personality Theory of Criminal Psychology to Nordic Noir: A Study

Crime fiction is a genre in literature that is mainly focused on crime, its detection, its solution, the criminal and his motives. Similar to the genre of crime fiction is the sub- genre within it called ‘Nordic Noir’ which is also known as ‘Scandinavian Noir’. It is a term given to the literature coming from the Nordic or Scandinavian countries like Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland etc. It is mainly known for its dark and bleak settings, description of its landscape and strong female characters. There have been various approaches that have tried to understand criminal mind and behaviour. Relating crime fiction and criminal psychology and its various theories will yield new insight as psychology and literature share a very close bond. The Personality Theory argues that there are a number of personality traits which are associated with an act of crime or violent behaviour. Eysenck in his book Crime and Personality published in 1964 established a relationship between criminal behaviour and personality. According to him, personality traits play a key role in criminality. He was of the view that some genetic traits along with certain environmental forces lead to criminal behaviour or conduct. The three super factors about which Eysenck talks about and upon which the PEN model is based are psychoticism (P), extraversion (E) and neuroticism (N). This paper aims at the application of Personality Theory as given by Hans Eysenck to the new emerging sub-genre of Nordic noir. As the genre deals with crime and criminals, therefore it would be highly insightful to study it in the light of criminal psychology.

Czyje jest miasto? Kilka uwag o jednej powieści K.M. Bakowa

The article looks at the question of using urban studies as a set of interpretive techniques in analyzing popular literature – especially in its most popular genre – crime fiction. On the basis of K.M. Bakow’s debut novel Albatros i hiena [Albatross and hyena], set in Bielsko-Biała, the author of the article shows how the criminal intrigue is enriched by a specific way of showing urban space and how it relates to the main character, detective Ewa Orlowska. The proposed model of interpretation can be used in discussing subsequent novels by the author of Padlinożercy [Scavengers] and fits into the framework of geopoetics and text interpretation.

A Psychoanalytic Study of Gillian Flynn’s Amy Elliott Dunne with reference to Lacan’s Three Stages of Identity Formation

Gone Girl is a crime fiction by the American author Gillian Flynn which provides a psychological insight into the mind and motive of the central character, Amy Elliott Dunne. The novel starts with Nick, the husband coming under police scrutiny in the case of his wife Amy, who goes missing on the very day of their fifth wedding anniversary. However, as the case gradually unfolds, the scenario gets much more complex. The character of Amy is portrayed as intricately complex and multi-layered. A close reading and psychoanalysis of the character of Amy show that her actions and behaviour patterns are a reflection of her ingrained identity formation. This paper intends to study the psyche behind the actions and behavioural patterns of Amy Elliott Dunne, the protagonist in Flynn’s Gone Girl, with reference to Lacan’s three stages of identity formation.

The Poetics of Murder in Popular Slovenian Crime Fiction from the Perspectives of Criminological Theories

The article draws on criminological theories and seeks to discover what different interpretations of the origins of crime can tell us about Slovenian crime fiction. The article introduces the basic characteristics of classical, positivist, interactionist and conflict criminological explanations of crime. This is folowed by the analysis of the poetics of murder in popular Slovenian crime fiction by Avgust Demšar and Tadej Golob from the perspectives of criminological theories. We find that standard continuous features appear in the crime fiction of both writers. Classical and positivist poetics of murder predominate, attributing the causes of crime to human opportunism and the individual’s pathological nature, respectively. The discussed crime novels are also characterised by the narrative red herring, or the semantic gap derived from deceiving detective clues, between the novelistic discourse of crime and the discourse of crime derived from the poetics of individual murders.

Italian Detective Fiction in a European Context: National, International, Transnational

Abstract: Detective fiction and place have always been tightly connected, both within the fiction itself and within the criticism. In this article, I look at French, Scandinavian and Italian crime fiction, with an eye not only to what a comparative analysis shows (traditionally rooted in a relatively static notion of national literatures that are assumed to be more or less “comparable” and thus in some sense equivalent) but—more importantly—to what an analysis attentive to a transnational understanding shows. The notion of the international and the idea of comparative are remarkably close in locating themselves in an abstract space between two objects of attention. Those objects are, in their abstracted state, more or less equal. What is lost in those abstractions is precisely what is not lost in the space of the transnational, since transnational movements are always from one specific place to another. Transnational studies should always capture the question of the asymmetric and differential power between nations and cultures—what makes it easy to go to some places, hard to go to other. Broadly speaking, I look at two very different kinds of crime fiction. First, the international thriller, in which the detective moves effortlessly around the world, the movement of Bauman’s “liquid modernity”—a genre that is, unsurprisingly, strongly associated with an invisible privilege and prestige. This subgenre is perhaps most tightly associated with the Anglophone world but certainly appears in France and Scandinavia as well. Second, what I call the “Euro-procedural”, a form that was pioneered by the Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöo in the 1960s but that has particularly flourished in the age of globalization, perhaps particularly in Italy. The Euro-procedural stresses, like all procedurals, the grinding and unpleasant day to day work of the detective, caught between a hostile public and a decaying European state; not every crime in the Euro-procedural involves other nations but, when they do, their transnational or transcultural nature is clearly marked, as human capital and valuable illicit materials like drugs are trafficked from the (relative) periphery to the (relative) center. Broadly speaking, the Euro-procedural insists on the boundaries that demarcate national spaces but does so in order to stress both the weakness of the nation state in an era of global crime and movements of capital, material and persons and also to stress the asymmetric relations of power between different nations or cultural spaces.

Fictiones nelle filosofie medievali e filosofie medievali nelle fictions

This contribution is divided into two independent parts: in the first part, it will deal not so much with examining individual cases of fictio and their role within a certain philosophy or an author, as to see how philosophizing or reasoning through fictiones has been theorized and practiced during the twel-fth and thirteenth centuries; in the second part, it will try, instead, to share what can be found reading medieval setting novels, and in particular medieval crime fiction, namely which image is given of medieval philosophers, philosophies and types of knowledge, and what type of role a wide range of disciplines going from medicine to the arts of trivium play within those narratives

The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia by Anna Schur (review)

Reviewed by: The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russiaby Anna Schur Muireann Maguire Schur, Anna. The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2022. xii + 224 pp. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $120.00; $39.95. W hentwo minor characters in Shakespeare's Henry VI(Part II) famously agree to 'kill all the lawyers', the specific source of their ire is lawyers' ability to alter lives by writing down words: namely, the fact that 'parchment, being scribbl'd o'er, should undo a man' (Act IV, Scene II). Anna Schur's meticulously researched and subtly argued monograph does not, thankfully, endorse genocide of the legal profession. Instead, she explores, in the context of nineteenth-century Russia, the resentful perception of lawyers as pseudo-authors, whose powers of invention, imagination and rhetoric, freely exercised in the courtroom, allowed them to rewrite — and sometimes to undo — the lives of ordinary men and women. Schur's title, The Letters and the Law, introduces these two conflicting perspectives: that of writers, whose enduring post-Pushkinian status as their nation's conscience endowed them with quasi-legal, and certainly with moral, authority; and that of the newly formed body of professional lawyers, particularly defence attorneys, practising after court reform supposedly modernized the Russian judiciary in 1864. While we learn about individuals on both sides of the debate, Schur's focus remains on particular celebrity lawyers and the literary reactions they provoked from leading authors, during a time-frame bracketed by the 1864 reform and the 1905 Revolution. Within this timeframe, she revisits some of the remarkable epithets inveighed against the legal profession, all adopted and recycled by its critics, ranging from journalistic invective to literary caricatures. They included 'adulterers of thought' (a phrase Dostoevskii borrowed from another source for use in The Brothers Karamazov), the 'attorney-spider' and ' premier amoureux' (both coined by Saltykov-Shchedrin, referring [End Page 155]respectively to the unscrupulousness and ingenuous eloquence he attributed to different types of lawyer), and lirstvo(or 'lyre-playing' — Dostoevskii, again, inveighing against empty eloquence). All this obloquy contributed to the widespread public perception of all lawyers (but especially defence lawyers) as greedy, hypocritical and ignorant — a calumny often combined with antisemitic vilification. Ironically, as Schur shows, newly qualified advocates often modelled their own reputations on those of acclaimed authors, either by actually publishing literature or simply by attempting to accrue, through psychological insight, ethical excellence, or rhetorical brilliance, the magic dust of Russian writers' moral prestige. Other scholars have recently studied other aspects of legal-literary relations in nineteenth-century Russia — notably Harriet Murav ( Russia's Legal Fictions, Ann Arbor, MI, 1998), Gary Rosenshield ( Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, The Jury Trial, and The Law, Madison, WI, 2005), and most recently Claire Whitehead's study of nineteenth-century Russian lawyers who also penned genre fiction, The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction 1860–1917: Deciphering Stories of Detection(Cambridge, 2018). Shur's work is informed by all of the above, in addition to extensive study of Russian legal history. The Letters and the Law's original contribution is to show how the legal profession was conceptualizedin late nineteenth-century Russia. Chapter one surveys lawyers' experimental self-fashioning as moral and literary arbiters, drawing on contemporary speeches, memoirs and publications; some advocates were honoured with election to the Academy of Sciences (like Tolstoi's friend, the judge A. F. Koni, who also takes credit for sharing the anecdote that inspired the former's novel, Resurrection). Chapter two re-examines how the celebrated defence lawyer, and accomplished literary scholar, Vladimir Spasovich, won the lurid 1876 Kronenberg child abuse case in favour of the accused (rather like a negative of Atticus Finch). Schur evaluates successive polemics against both Spasovich's ethics and his eloquence, mounted by Dostoevskii, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Vladimir Rozanov, all pillorying the so-called 'Polish lawyer' (p. 58) for the very skills that won the case, and (in Rozanov's 1897 attack) for his implied claim to reputational parity with writers. Chapter three studies the negative clichés accreting around lawyers...

The Genre of Female Metaphysical Detective Novel: Tradition and Modernity

This article investigates female metaphysical detective novel as a specific literary genre of crime fiction. The theoretical framework of the study includes several cross-fertilizing approaches such as the structuralist approach to the genre theory, the theory of postmodern anti-detective novel, and the feminist reading of the detective novel evolution. The nexus where these mutually correlated theoretical approaches overlap is the concept of female metaphysical detective novel.This subgenre of detective fiction intertwines several important elements of the postmodern aesthetics, i.e., self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and subver-siveness with emphasis on political, gender, and class issues. The specific character of female-authored de-tective stories is studied diachronically and synchronically. The evolution of the genre of female metaphysi-cal detective novel from the Golden Age until now is considered through the lens of metaphysical or hetero-topian settings that are featured in detective fiction writtenby women. First, it is shown that the construction of space in several Golden Age narratives provides grounds to consider them the precursors of contemporary female metaphysical novel. The conclusion is made that even before feminism was universally recognized as a literary theory, women had been trying to break out of the ‘locked room’ canon designated for them mainly by traditional literary criticism. Next, several new tendencies are pinpointed that have appeared in female-authored detective fiction onlyrecently. Finally, the set of generic features is identified that are characteristic of female metaphysical detective novel as a distinct genre of crime fiction. Most prominently, the novels epitomizing the genre foreground the evolution of the heroine’s identity depicted as a complex network of gendered spaces.

Satyajit ray’s detective fiction and its socio-cultural impact in 19th century Bengal

Satyajit Ray invented the fictional Kolkata-based private investigator known as Bengali Sleuth Feluda, whose real name is Pradosh Chandra Mitter. He frequently has two sidekicks by his side: Lalmohan Ganguly, a clumsy crime fiction author who goes by the pen name Jatayu, and Topshe, his cousin Tapesh Ranjan Mitra. There is no readily documented legendary genesis story for Satyajit Ray&#39;s private eye Feluda, yet it is also not a case of accidental artistic whim. The prehistory of Ray&#39;s favourite detective character may be determined by carefully examining his intellectual and cultural milieu. Ray has given Feluda some characteristics that make him different from the stereotypes. In addition to taking down smugglers in Bombay, Feluda exposes a conspiracy and pursues a criminal who is trying to desecrate Indian temples across the country. The study explores the sociocultural imprint Satyajit Ray left in Bengal in the nineteenth century through his detective fiction, Robertsoner Ruby (Robertson’s Ruby) Hatyapuri (The House of the Death). It reframes writings and the repeating ideas and motifs they include within a larger social and historical framework. This essay also makes an effort to highlight Ray&#39;s singularity in terms of his background, methods of detection, and narrative tactics. By borrowing Bengal&#39;s rich cultural heritage, Ray localised the genre and used his protagonist to try to solve the unanswered mysteries.

Deconstructing Truth as a Symbolic Construct in Mukoma wa Ngugi’s Nairobi Heat

As a literary work which builds its plot on the intricacies of crime and murder, Mukoma wa Ngugi's Nairobi Heat has many of its criticisms focused on vices thus giving the text a meaning as expected, of a crime fiction. However, critical discourse has not been focused on deconstructing the symbolic idea of Truth in the text and its relevance in generating new and multiple meanings in the text. Therefore, through a close reading, this research aims to explicate the running idea of truth in the novel as a symbolic construct and traces the chains of multiple meaning it signifies. This is achieved through a focus on Paul Ricoeur's dialectical hermeneutics of faith and suspicion, which seeks to unearth hidden meanings from the primary symbol. To this end, the research focused on three objectives, first, it devotes itself to the identification of truth as a symbolic construct in the text; second, analyses the symbol of truth based on the hermeneutics of faith, which reveals truth to be that centred on the true reasons behind the death of Marcy Jane and other crimes in the text thus making it a quest for justice: while lastly, the symbol of truth is critiqued based on the hermeneutics of suspicion, which demystifies the hidden meaning of truth as truth for self-identification and truth about Africa which also serves as the supreme finding of the research. Keywords: Truth, Symbol, Hermeneutics, Faith, Suspicion, Meaning, Mukoma. DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/95-02 Publication date: January 31 st 2023

Łódź „retro” w kryminałach historycznych

The article analyzes the way of constructing the image of the city in historical crime fiction set in Łódź. The texts analyzed in the article are the novel Perkalowy dybuk [Percale dybbuk] by Konrad T. Lewandowski about the events of 1929, Tramwaj Tanfaniego [Tanfani’s tram] by Marcin Andrzejewski, a novel set in 1905, and Krzysztof Beśka’s trilogy Trzeci brzeg Styksu [The Third Shore of Styx] Pocztówka z Londynu [A Postcard from London] and Dolina popiołów [Valley of Ashes], novels set in the years 1892–1893. All the texts provide an point of departure for showing the image of Łódź at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and in the interwar period, as shaped in the contemporary popular literature. Władysław Reymont’s Ziemia obiecana [The Promised Land] seems to be a starting point for all authors, but in all texts this image borrowed from the fundamental “Łódź text” becomes complicated. It seems that eventually in this unconventional form, which historical crime fiction undoubtedly is, we find a reflection of contemporary dilemmas of the urban space. Its residents try to find their own identity in the meanders of memory and oblivion in the industrial-proletarian past of the “bad city”.

제임스 호그의 재해석

James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner(1824) is often mentioned as an ambiguous work that deals with religious mania and split personality. Also, his story becomes more like open puzzles in crime fiction through gothic and metafictional techniques. Beneath his complicated contents and forms, however, we need to find Hogg's political and cultural intentions. From a long time ago, Scottish mysticism has been suppressed by the government and authentic religion. His intentional use of antinomianism is a pretext to address the independent and undaunted spirit of Scottish people whose faith is close to fatalism. The reinterpretations of his work by contemporary novelists reveal the author's original intentions well.

The Challenges of Translating Cultural Embeddedness in Crime Fiction: A Picture from Croatia

The aim of the present study is to examine the specific features of translations of crime fiction in Croatia in the 2000s. Frederic Jameson (quoted in Rolls, Vuaille-Barcan, West-Sooby 2016) foregrounds the notion of crime fiction’s role as the new Realism due to the importance it places on historical and geographical specificity, together with the social fabric of our daily lives. As such, it is possible that an excessive emphasis on place in crime fiction may present a particular challenge in translation, not only in terms of the translation strategies chosen by translators, but also in terms of the preferred marketing strategies pursued by publishers and editors and the correspondence between them. This study focuses on the patterns of handling source-culture embeddedness, typical of this genre, in translation. It examines how diverse agents (publishers, editors and translators) involved in the production of translations of this genre interact, and how their interaction influences the decisions on handling the genre’s embeddedness in a particular sourceculture reality. As crime fiction novels are a highly popular translated genre in Croatia, they make up a substantial portion of the production of the publishing sector. For the purposes of this study, a number of crime fiction novels by several frequently translated authors have been selected (P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, and Michael Connelly), published by Croatian publishers with diverse profiles, ranging from well-established companies to those more recently set up. The data analysed includes selected textual segments, the peritext of such editions, and interviews with the agents involved (translators and editors).

Is a Crime Novel in Translation Capable of Teaching Us History? A Consideration of the Translations of Śmierć w Breslau [Death In Breslau] and Głowa Minotaura [The Minotaur's Head] by Marek Krajewski

Crime novel is considered one of the most important innovations of the twentieth century in the field of fiction. Together with cinema, television and “elite” literature which often take over some of its features (themes and plots), it plays a significant role in creating the representation of reality proposed to the readers. The investigation described in the novels is set in a context which refers to the real world, in its social, political or historical aspects. The realistic dimension of the crime story makes it a kind of “social document”, which attracts the attention of researchers, including non-literary scholars. Reading crime novels allows them to acquire strictly literary information, but also some knowledge about communities, which leads them to an interpretation of relationships between literature and society. In this paper, the translated crime novel is seen as a special means of enriching the reader’s knowledge of the source culture. The realistic character of the work, which is supposed to fulfil a primarily ludic function, implies a certain tension in the work of the translator, who is led to ask himself: “shall I entertain or shall I entertain and teach”? If realism becomes a constitutive feature of crime fiction, if, as stated by Maryse Petit and Gilles Menegaldo, “under the pretext of attracting a crime novel client, the intention is to give him a history lesson or to make him think about a certain state of society”, the translator may be bound to include in the translation some elements that supplement the “encyclopaedic” knowledge of the target reader. The analysis is based on two novels by Marek Krajewski – his first novel, Death in Breslau (1999), set in the inter-war period, featuring the German policeman Eberhard Mock, and The Minotaur’s Head, published a decade later, which action takes Mock to Lwów in the time when it was a Polish city and makes him befriend a Polish commissioner, Popielski. A comparison of some of their translations (eight for the first book, three for the second) shows differences in the treatment of the historical component of the novels, both in the treatment of selected text elements, as a result of the translator’s project, and in the peritexts, which, however, usually do not depend on the translator, but on the publisher.