Introduction: Disability and Detective Fiction / Susannah B. Mintz and Mark Osteen
“The blindest of the blind”: Blind Men, Beggars, and Murderers in Catherine Crowe’s Crime Fiction / Emily Cline
Catherine Crowe portrays literal and figurative blindness in the proto-detective stories Men and Women (1843), Lilly Dawson (1847), and “The Blind Witness and His Dog” (1849). Embodied and metaphorical blindness propose competing forms of knowledge, sympathetic and diagnostic, revealing the optocentric biases that limit the Victorian criminal court’s means of detection.
Seeing Is (Dis)believing: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Classification of Disability in The Trail of the Serpent / Roshnara Kissoon (Teachers College, Columbia University)
This essay examines the depiction of disability in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1860), which features a nonverbal detective protagonist. Braddon’s novel elucidates, and contributes to, a taxonomy of disability that intersects with its nuanced class system, ultimately revealing the limits of both, despite its innovative portrayal.
Broken Bones: Isolation, Mobility, and Interdependence in Rear Window / Mark Osteen
This essay demonstrates how the sleuthing of L.B. Jefferies, his girlfriend Lisa, and his nurse Stella metaphorically reassembles Mrs. Thorwald, Rear Window’s murder victim. Jefferies’s disability eventually enables him to recognize not only his but also neighbors’ interdependency and results in his metamorphosis into a more compassionate neighbor and lover.
“Do you see?”: Disability and “Seeing” Evidence in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon / Darren Gray
Red Dragon subverts crime fiction’s tropes of the monstrous criminal and extraordinary detective by exploring both disabled and nondisabled viewpoints. Through disfigured and speech-impaired criminal Francis Dolarhyde, investigator Will Graham, and the blind Reba McAllen, Thomas Harris exposes the subjectivity of perception and the impacts of ableism, marginalization, and prejudice.
Disabilities and Stephen King’s Detectives / Michael J. Blouin (Milligan Univ)
Stephen King has repeatedly returned to characters with disabilities to explore what it means to be human, intersecting with King’s under-examined forays into detective fiction. Although King’s depictions of individuals living with disabilities remain problematic, his bestselling works offer fecund sites for ruminating upon the relationship between disabilities and detective stories.
Defying Diagnosis: Neuroqueering Narrative Closure in Tana French’s The Likeness / Shannon Walters (Temple Univ)
This essay explores the concept of neuroqueering in relation to detective fiction, offering alternative ways to understand disability and detection. Tana French’s The Likeness suggests that the ambiguous neurodivergence of the characters and difference in their neuroqueer approaches leads to a generative reading defying diagnosis and narrative closure.
Disability Identity and Autism Acceptance in The Residence / Sonya Freeman Loftis (Morehouse College)
Drawing on the idea of the detective as an isolated and lonely genius, Netflix’s The Residence (2025) features a detective figure with autistic traits. The Residence subtly explores issues of disability pride, acceptance, and community while hinting at various ways in which its autistic detective figure grapples with ableist discrimination.
Disabling Louise Penny’s The Madness of Crowds / Susannah B. Mintz
Through the eugenicist statistician advocating mass euthanasia of the elderly and disabled in Louise Penny’s The Madness of Crowds (2021), disabilities are instrumentalized in familiarly negative ways, thus undermining the novel’s more progressive intentions and perpetuating stereotypes that (especially dangerous in the post-Covid era) figure disability as an essentialized category of victimhood.
REVIEWS
Mark Dawidziak. A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe / Leslie Gardner (Univ of Essex)
Eric Sandberg. Studying Crime in Fiction: An Introduction / David A. Stivers (Savannah College of Art and Design)
Dan W. Clanton, Jr. God and the Little Grey Cells: Religion in Agatha Christie’s Poirot Stories / Marty S. Knepper
Jem Bloomfield. Allusion in Detective Fiction: Shakespeare, the Bible, and Dorothy L. Sayers / Rita Rippetoe
Roger Dalrymple and Andrew Green. The Idea of Education in Golden Age Detective Fiction / Meike Heinrich (Freie Universität Berlin)
David Lehman. The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir / Annika R.P. Deutsch (Univ of Utah)
Max Allan Collins and James L. Traylor. Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction / Diane M. Calhoun-French
Anjili Babbar. Finders: Justice, Faith, and Identity in Irish Crime Fiction / Mary McGlynn (Baruch College, CUNY, and the CUNY Graduate Center)
Index to Volume 43 / Compiled by Annika R.P. Deutsch
No comments:
Post a Comment