Crime Fiction Genre Research Articles

The Genre and Trends of Crime Fiction in Nigeria

The field of crime fiction in Nigeria remains under-explored in scholarly discourse. This lacuna is particularly notable given the absence of comprehensive academic works dedicated to this genre. Crime fiction, which delineates narratives surrounding criminals, their crimes, detection and investigation processes, and underlying motivations, has been a prolific subject in Nigerian creative literature. Despite the substantial body of Nigerian literary works delving into themes of crime, punishment, and motivation, it is intriguing that the genre has not garnered significant critical analysis. This study adopts a diachronic approach to trace the historical evolution of crime fiction in Nigeria. It further investigates various sub-genres within this literary category and examines how a multitude of socio-political dynamics have influenced the thematic focus of Nigerian crime fiction. The study posits that crime fiction is gaining relevance in contemporary Nigerian society. It reveals that a significant corpus of these narratives grapple with issues such as colonialism, militarism, corruption, government apathy towards human and national development, and other opaque political and economic elements that perpetuate Nigeria’s precarious journey towards democratic stability.

Money Moves

The crime fiction genre is one of many clichés, including isolated locations, technology struggles, law enforcement errors, red herrings, and more. These clichés interact with various class, gender, language, and religious identities that influence how investigations evolve and how the genre is received by its audience. Tana French’s The Secret Place (2014) and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018) all interact with these genre conventions through isolated boarding schools and mansions on hilltops, law enforcement errors, investigative dynamic duos, and more, but the most significant of genre conventions is their consideration of the scapegoat and its functionality. In this essay, a scapegoat is a character knowingly forced to endure the blame and punishment for another’s actions. While these pieces follow genre conventions in the presence of a scapegoat, each piece of literature juggles red herrings and the class-based scapegoats in new lights. These pieces transcend the genre by forcefully calling out the class-based scapegoat, considering the perspective of the scapegoat, and vindicating the scapegoat. This essay will investigate the role of the scapegoat within The Secret Place and My Sister, the Serial Killer within the context of literary crime fiction genre conventions with Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) as a framework to examine the significance of class, race, and violence in the decolonization of literary crime fiction. Tana French and Oyinkan Braithwaite transcend genre conventions established by wealthy, white English authors such as Agatha Christie by confronting contemporary issues through their consideration of the class-based scapegoat. This confrontational transcendence utilizes scapegoats to call out the marginalization and oppression of diverse populations by privileged individuals and subsequently replace the traditionally privileged individuals with the previously marginalized people.

The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction

The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction

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.

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.

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.

Violence, Ethics, Representation: Don Winslow and Roberto Bolaño in Ciudad Juárez

Violence, Ethics, Representation:Don Winslow and Roberto Bolaño in Ciudad Juárez Andrew Pepper (bio) What is at stake when writers of fiction try to represent violence? What ethical and aesthetic problems are enacted when the frame of fiction is placed around the "real," and how far can these problems ever be adequately addressed? This essay looks at how ROBERTO BOLAÑO and DON WINSLOW, in their respective novels 2666 (2004) and The Cartel (2015), represent the real world violence afflicting the U.S.-Mexico border city of El Paso/Ciudad Juárez from 1993 to the present. There are significant overlaps between these novels in terms of their narrative scope, their genre-bending ambitions, and their desire to tie this "new" violence to the accumulative tendencies of contemporary capitalism. However, these novels' aesthetic practices, linked to not always commensurate understandings of genre, push the ethical claims that each is able to make in new directions. In the case of 2666, BOLAÑO'S unwillingness to offer straightforward explanations for the murders of women in Juárez and his desire to push against the crime fiction genre's demand for explanation [End Page 575] allows him to, daringly, think about how the violence is normalized across society. In the novel, violence operates in plain sight—a key ethical claim—even if the attendant obliqueness of vision means that the dead women are not afforded much of a voice. In The Cartel, WINSLOW'S self-identification as a crime fiction novelist means he instrumentalizes the violence by representing the ambitions of a few narco bosses in order to make visible the links between individual action, global capitalism, and state sovereignty. Thus, a different set of ethical claims are enacted. WINSLOW'S move to disclose allows us to see and understand the victims and perpetrators of violence as fully realized characters and in turn speaks to a desire to map the full range of social relations in Juárez, even if "totality," as a term derived from FREDRIC JAMESON'S "cognitive mapping," remains tantalizingly out of reach.1 The "ethical" turn in literary studies has produced much soul-searching about the responsibilities of novelists and literary critics with regard to the subjects of their works, the counter-maneuvers that ask why novels or literary criticism should have any ethical responsibilities, and, further, whether ethical claims are inevitably complicit in the systems of power they ostensibly oppose.2 In this essay, I am less interested in answering the more general question of what is meant by "ethical" when it comes to literature than in asking what is at stake when the frame of fiction is placed around the "real" and how these two novelists' fraught ethical responses to the dilemma of dead bodies, in particular female ones, are connected to understandings of genre. "The world is real but not easily apparent," argues Jairus Victor Grove, and as such, "the fight to see, think, and feel things as they are requires an affirmative sense of genre."3 By "affirmative," Grove does not mean positive or uplifting, rather that genres, widely understood insofar as "CNN is a genre, security reports are a genre, terror alert levels are a genre," are not merely reflections of our world but help constitute it.4 The problem with these "everyday" types of genre, Grove suggests, is that they produce a "common sense of reality" or "consensus reality."5 Hence, he argues it is to the "wilder" or "contrarealist" genres like horror and sci-fi that we need to turn to in order "to make visible what is meant to be ignored or normalized" and "to pierce the veil of consensus reality."6 Self-evident ethical work in this move to "make visible" and "pierce the veil" provides the jumping-off point for my [End Page 576] consideration of the complex relationship between violence, ethics, and representation in 2666 and The Cartel: what the utilization of genre in both novels allows us to see, and not see, requires further elucidation. We tend to think of literary genres as static and self-actuating, with their own codes and conventions, where the distinctions between crime, espionage, horror, sci-fi, and war...

The Birth of a Detective: Edgar Allan Poe's Immortalisation

A big allure of fiction for the readers has been the constant suspense and the question of “And then what happened?” This question, which makes the reader turn page after page, forgetting the clock and sometimes even hunger or thirst, achieves an exceptional height when one turns to the crime fiction or mystery genre: the pursuit of that which is not known, the attempt to deduce it out of the given information, and the denouement that ties it all together—all of these elements create a form of fiction that has entranced generations for centuries, if not millennia. The characters found in these fictions have entered the collective consciousness as more than real. But where did these characters and tropes first originate? This paper aims to explore three detective works by Edgar Allan Poe— ”Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter.” These are stories with Victorian gothic settings that pre-date the emergence of crime fiction as a separate genre, before the term “detective” was invented, and attempts to find whether Poe indeed was the first author to create a character that follows the traits of the modern detectives such as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. By way of this analysis, the paper gives an insight into what constitutes a modern detective characterisation, along with examining the tropes and themes related to the crime fiction and mystery genre.

ДИАЛОГ ДЕТЕКТИВА И ИНТЕЛЛЕКТУАЛЬНОЙ ФАНТАСТИКИ В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ АДОЛЬФО БЬОЯ КАСАРЕСА 1940-Х ГОДОВ

The article deals with the prolific creative period of the prominent Argentine prose writer of the twentieth century Adolfo Bioy Casares - 1940-s. This is the time when his original artistic style was formed, which is studied in the context of the interrelation of elements and features, inherent in both popular and “elevated” literature. The analysis of the novel The Invention of Morel (1940) and the short story In Memory of Pauline (1948) allows us to trace how in Bioy Casares’s prose the features of the crime fiction genre are organically combined with philosophical fiction, and what enriching imprint on this artistic experiment has been left by the collaboration of the writer with Jorge Luis Borges and Silvina Ocampo.

Neo-Victorian felony – Crime narratives in Graeme Macrae Burnet’sHis Bloody Projectand Ian McGuire’sThe North Water

AbstractThe neo-Victorian novel has been one of the most significant branches of contemporary British historical fiction for the past three decades. Thanks to works like A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Sarah Waters’ trilogy Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, the genre has gained not only considerable popularity among readers, but also almost a canonical literary status. Although recent neo-Victorian fiction has been trying to find some new ways in which the genre could avoid stereotypical narratives, it still retains its most determining idiosyncrasies. One of them is an interest in the undersides of Victorian society, including the themes of violence and criminality, which is why these novels often resort to the genre of crime and detective fiction. This is also the case of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2015) and Ian McGuire’s The North Water (2016), both historical novels set in Victorian Britain which were, respectively, shortlisted and longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. This paper attempts to show the different manners in which these two novels employ various forms of crime narratives so as to achieve their goal of presenting convincing and seemingly authentic insights into the more obscure aspects of the Victorian era.

Moronga, by Horacio Castellanos Moya, and the Divergence of Latin American Noir

Abstract Taking Moronga (2018), by Salvadorian author Horacio Castellanos Moya, as a point of departure, this article focuses on the reinterpretation of mainstream crime fiction in Latin American terms. This new approach is made from both formal and thematic perspectives. Moronga is structurally fragmented; the traditional detective figure has disappeared, and the plot does not revolve around a single crime but denounces a society at large which is characterized by paranoid surveillance. The reinterpretation of the crime fiction genre in Latin American terms has opened up two different strands of noir: firstly, the so-called ‘post-neopolicial’ where crime is a mere backdrop to formal experimentation, and secondly, what Ricardo Piglia refers to as ‘ficción paranoica’ [paranoiac fiction]. Moronga is a good example of both these strands, making it an appropriate case study to analyse the ways in which Hispanic literature deviates from classic Anglophone crime fiction (particularly the North American hardboiled tradition).

Queering the Lost Child and the Politics of Failure in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010) is a central edifice in the ever-growing genre of South African crime fiction. A decidedly post-apartheid literary trend (though not exclusive to it), crime fiction contributes to commentary on South African futurity, which is often portrayed as violent and almost always disappointing. Understanding the ways in which South African literature has been beleaguered with anxieties about the future, this article employs the figure of the queer child as an analytic to explore the generative politics of failure. Taking up queer theory’s anti-social thesis, recently considered in Andrew van der Vlies’s Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), and the concept of the queer child, put forward in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), I argue that while the queer child may disrupt a narrative of reproductive futurism, it offers an alternative to both a failed future and a rainbow one. I consider the role of two types of queer children in the novel: the child queered by innocence and the child queered by degeneracy. By examining the exchange of and relationships between these children, I argue that the child queered by degeneracy hitches South African futurity to a queer celebration of state failure.

True Crime Narratives

This article investigates the contemporary fascination with true crime narratives, an subject which is fast becoming a central area of interest in crime fiction studies. As the overarching genre of crime fiction itself becomes the most read literature genre, not to mention its growing popularity in other popular cultural mediums – TV, film, documentary, podcast, blogs, etc., true crime – which has always been a popular sub-genre – is arguably moving centre stage aligned to our recent obsession with the real life figure of the serial killer. The usual discussions of both individual and collective obsession and fascination with such topics, is generally limited to arguments within conscious parameters of ethical choice, This paper will explore an alterative reading that introduces the Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of the sinthome and jouissance, and argues that any reading of these topics cannot be contained within conceptions of rationality and ethical choice.

Literature as Activism - From Entertainment to Challenging Social Norms: Michael Nava’s Goldenboy (1988)

The aim of this article is to examine how Michael Nava appropriates the conventions of Detective/Crime Fiction to engage in artivism, whereby art is used to challenge sexual and ethnic social oppression and inequality. By providing an analysis of the heteronormative conventions of the Detective and Crime Fiction genre, the article focuses on the ways in which narratives portray homophobic violence, as well as on the fact that such portrayals result from and contribute to the promotion of heteronormative hegemonies. Following this, I focus on Michael Nava’s Goldenboy (1988) and I analyse Nava’s writing in relation to the wider Chicano tradition of using art to engage in activism, what has been termed as ‘artivism.’ The central argument of this paper is that Nava ‘queers’ the form of the Detective Fiction genre to highlight the shortcomings of our society, the effects of the hegemonial heteronormativity, and the need for social change.

Trudności związane z przekładem elementów kulturospecyficznych w literaturze kryminalnej: przykład Chorwacji

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 translating crime fiction genre in Croatia in the 2000s. Frederic Jameson (qtd. in Rolls, Vuaille-Barcan &amp; West-Sooby 2016) foregrounded the notion of crime fiction’s role as the new Realism due to the importance it places on historical and geographical specificity, and the social fabric of our daily lives. In line with this, an assumption could be made that the overvaluation of place in crime fiction may present a particular challenge in translation, not only in terms of translation strategies chosen by translators, but also in terms of preferable marketing strategies pursued by publishers and editors and the correspondence between them. The focus of this study is on the patterns of handling source-culture embeddedness, typical of this genre, in translation. The study examines how diverse agents (editors, translators and language revisers) 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, source-culture, reality. As crime fiction novels are a highly popular translated genre in Croatia, crime fiction novels make a substantial portion of the production of the publishing sector. For the purposes of this study we have selected a number of crime fiction novels by several frequently translated authors (P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Michael Connelly) that have been published by Croatian publishers of diverse profiles, ranging from well-established publishers with long presence on the market to start-ups with a relatively short market life. The data analyzed include interviews with the agents involved (translators, editors and language revisers), peritext of these editions and analysis of selected textual segments.

Contemporary Crime Fiction in Australia: an interview with Candice Fox

Australian author Candice Fox has become a relevant name in the genre of crime fiction in Australia since the publication of her first novel, Hades, in 2013. In six years, she has authored two trilogies: the Archer-Bennet series (2013-2015) (Hades, Eden and Fall) and the Ted and Amanda series (2016-2018) (Crimson Lake, Redemption Point and Gone by Midnight) and co-authored a novella and five novels with bestselling American author James Patterson: the Harriet Blue saga (2016-2019)(the novella Black and Blue and the novels Never Never, Fifty Fifty, Liar Liar and Hush Hush) and The Inn (to be published on 6 August 2019).This interview took place via Skype while Candice Fox and I were at our respective homes in Australia and Spain, on 18-19 October 2016.

Reading Patrick Modiano's The Black Notebook as a Topographical Crime Novel

This paper provides a new reading of Patrick Modiano's The Black Notebook (2016) as a topographical crime novel. This new reading adds strength to the perspective which believes that the literary genre of crime fiction has evolved over the past decades in its narrative subject matter, and many crime novels have conveyed local and topographical knowledge about their settings. 1960s Paris is the setting of Modiano’s The Black Notebook since the city is his birth place and source of inspiration. Therefore, Modiano dedicates his novel to exploring the secretive life of the city and its urban topography. The Black Notebook is a long meditation on the topographical features, whether natural or man-made, of 1960s Paris, and this study alters the critical conversation about Modiano's novel and shows how it characteristically typifies the evolution of the literary genre from a fiction of crime into a fiction of touristic, topographical and geographic orientation

6Ecocriticism

AbstractThis review of publications in the field of ecocriticism in 2018 is divided into six sections: 1. Introduction: Anthropocene Timescales and Affects; 2. Affective Ecocriticism; 3. Material and Empirical Ecocriticisms; 4. Ecocriticism and Ecopoetics; 5. Ecocritical Convergences; 6. Conclusion. The review focuses on four single-authored monographs, three edited book collections, three journal issues, and three stand-alone articles. The biospheric urgencies of the Anthropocene and its cataclysmic signature—climate change—have attracted ecocritical attention to concerns of time, scale, and affect. In particular, 2018 marked the further maturation of material and queer ecocriticisms, the florescence of affective ecocriticism, and the germination of empirical ecocriticism. The field in 2018 explores, in depth, the role of affect—emotions, intensities, corporealities, and modes of relations—in the Anthropocene. All the while, confluences between affective, material, and queer ecocriticisms continue to broaden the scope of environmental affect to include ‘bad’ and irreverent modes. What’s more, new publications in material ecocriticism draw attention to environmental narratives as vehicles for concretizing the highly abstract spatiotemporalities of the Anthropocene whereas empirical ecocriticism applies qualitative methods to understanding the transformative potential of narratives. 2018 saw major studies of ecopoetics in addition to convergences between ecocriticism, animal studies, performance studies, crime fiction studies, and the environmental humanities. The year also brought the extension of ecocritical approaches to the genre of crime fiction and the literature of the Global South.

Crime Fiction and Black Criminality

This essay demonstrates how mid-twentieth-century crime fiction developed in response to midcentury discourses of racial criminality. In the 1950s, the myth of black criminality served to mediate anxieties about the emerging Civil Rights movement and rising rates of black unemployment. In this context, crime novelists found it increasingly difficult to ignore the link between the narration of crime and the criminalization of race. What did it mean to write about crime in the shadow of postwar US racial politics? I argue that this question helped define the distinctive midcentury genre of novels about criminals. While novelists like Patricia Highsmith used the backdrop of racial criminalization to write about the inner lives of white criminals, other writers, including Dorothy B. Hughes, Charles Willeford, and most importantly Richard Wright, focused directly on the narrative dilemmas posed by the black criminal protagonist. Through their literary attempts to uncouple race from crime, these writers show us how the genre of crime fiction became a key cultural form for grappling with the emergence of the US carceral state.

Caryce kryminału. Kryminał kobiecy w Rosji

The article is an attempt to illustrate the female writers influence on the evolution of the crime fiction genre in Russia. It outlines a brief history of the genre, its complexity and the evolution of the main character. The article focuses on the works of the most famous Russian female writers in terms of their contributions to the crime fiction genre. The author also brings attention to the intercultural dialogue which as a result of Chmilewska's direct influence can be found in the novels by the tsarinas of crime fiction.