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Introduction: Insight into Messy Truths
Caroline Reitz (John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Graduate Center)
Ukrainian Crime Fiction: Trends, Themes, Traditions
Svitlana (Lana) Krys (MacEwan University, Canada)
This article traces the development of crime fiction in Ukraine: its origins in the gothic literary movement, main authors, historical memory and colonial traumas, role as an instrument of Ukraine’s cultural diplomacy, limited presence in the Soviet era, and proliferation following Ukraine’s independence.
Sympathy for the Devil: Failed Catharsis and Universal Guilt in Agatha Christie's Curtain
Emilie Laurent (Université Clermont Auvergne, France)
Reading Christie's Curtain as a depiction of an ideological battle between good and evil, this essay analyzes the novel as a manipulation of the reader’s moral judgment that dissolves the genre’s over-optimistic promise of restoration social order and generates anxiety about a possible guilt located within the
reader’s self.
Dangerous Skepticism and the Challenge of Acknowledgment in Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Christine Hamm (University of Bergen, Norway)
This essay argues that crime fiction can encourage readings of literature that differ from those criticized by Rita Felski (2015) as outcomes of a “hermeneutics
of suspicion.” Tracing motivations for and effects of skepticism at the plot level, Nordic noir such as Smilla’s Sense of Snow promotes acknowledgment rather than “critique.”
Pie in the Sky: Political Readings of Dashiell Hammett’s “Faith”
Jacob A. Zumoff (New Jersey City University)
This essay examines “Faith,” a short story by Dashiell Hammett unpublished in his lifetime, exploring its relationship to detective fiction, proletarian fiction, and literary modernism. The story’s setting suggests a left-wing perspective yet resists easy political categorization, contributing to our understanding of Hammett’s evolving literary approach to detective fiction and complex relationship to left-wing politics and modernism.
A Woman Agent in the Male World of the Cold War Spy Novel:
The Case of Len Deighton’s Fiona Samson
Howard Mason
This essay discusses Len Deighton’s Fiona Samson, a female agent with strong character traits who is working for the West during the Cold War. Samson’s womanhood and femininity, as well as her love of husband and family, eventually take precedence over her agency as a professional intelligence officer.
Killing a Phantom—or Resurrecting Her?
Reclaiming the Femme Fatale in Contemporary U.S. and UK Noir Fiction
Suzanne A. Solomon (University of East Anglia, UK)
The femme fatale’s development in contemporary U.S. and UK noir fiction differs from hard-boiled fiction’s female investigator, who embodies a range of intersectional identities. This article posits that institutional inequities in U.S./UK publishing and a focus on a white, female, and middle-class readership have enabled a postfeminist recuperation of the femme fatale.
Bad Grandmas: Domestic Noir, Ageism, and the Toxic Matriarch
Roberta Garrett (University of East London)
This article argues that although cozy crime offers positive roles for post- menopausal women, domestic thrillers often depict them as arrogant villains who torment younger heroines. It proposes that the cycle’s animosity toward older women derives from a distorted, media-fueled view that the current generation of boomer women are lazy and overprivileged.
TEACHING FORUM: CRIME FICTION IN THE MULTILINGUAL CLASSROOM
Guest Editors: Barbara Pezzott (Monash University, Australia), with Rachel Schaffer and Ciara Gorman
The Detective as Historian, Crime Fiction as Alternative Historiography
Maria Novella Mercuri (University College London)
The article relates the experience of teaching an undergraduate course based on novels by Daeninckx, Vázquez Montalbán, and Vichi that are as much a social history of their times as well as well-plotted and well-written crime fiction works.
Crossing the Crime Scene: The Case of Gaslight
Alessandra Calanchi
In crime fiction courses, students cannot grasp the extent of psychological pressure, the danger of evil, or the importance of rational behavior without necessary involvement. Discussed here is coursework involving the film Gaslight (dir. George Cukor, 1944), where, although no murder occurs, the crime scene is spread all over the story and remains relevant today.
Decolonizing and Indigenizing the Study of Crime Fiction
Carlos Uxo (Monash University)
Australia’s Indigenous Voice Referendum (2023) and the adoption of a robust decolonizing approach by Monash University provided an ideal background to explore representations of indigeneity in crime fiction, focusing on the Mexican novel The Uncomfortable Dead (What’s Missing Is Missing) by Subcomandante Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II.
From Paris to Corsica: The Pedagogical Power of Crime Fiction in Multilingual Contexts
Carolyn Stott and Clara Sitbon (University of Sydney)
The authors discuss how they focus on multilingualism in the French crime fiction classroom in Australia. The short-story format incorporating texts from across different regions helps students understand the multilingual and multicultural complexities and differences in the Francophone world.
Understanding Complexity, Hybridity, and Atmosphere in German Crime Fiction
Christiane Weller (Monash University)
This article discusses the teaching of Germanophone crime fiction in a multilingual classroom, examining whether notions of hybridity and atmosphere can help students understand works outside of their linguistic and cultural skill set. The TV series Babylon Berlin elucidates how a sophisticated, multilayered textual structure can be decoded through an atmospheric reading.
Assessment in the Multilingual Crime Fiction Classroom: Mapping the Genre’s Transnationality
Stewart King (Monash University)
This essay describes the design of an assessment task, in which third-year
university students employ their discipline-specific linguistic and cultural
knowledge to produce a map that foregrounds the genre’s inherent transnationality.
The Role of the Creative Assignment in Italian Detective Fiction Courses
Gianmarco Bocchi (University of Toronto/University of St. Jerome, Canada)
The creative assignment option for students in university-level detective fiction courses can boost student creativity, involve critical thinking, and enable learners to reflect on the genre’s evolution since its inception. It also allows students to engage with and identify the key features of detective fiction on global and local scales.
Guilty Pleasure? Decolonizing the Curriculum Through Hispanic Crime Narratives
Carolina Miranda (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
Incorporating Hispanic crime narratives and others produced in other cultures into comparative or multicultural coursework provides an excellent opportunity to challenge Anglo-centric perspectives, decolonize the curriculum, and discuss historical events that haunt society. By scrutinizing crime and its representations, students are invited to reflect upon cultural, historical, and political debates.
REVIEWS
Rebecca Rego Barry. The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells: Investigations into a Forgotten Mystery Author Anissa M. Graham (University of North Alabama)
Molly Slavin. Criminal Cities: The Postcolonial Novel and Cathartic Crime
Pamela Bedore (University of Connecticut, Avery Point)
Barbara Pezzotti. Mediterranean Crime Fiction: Transcultural Narratives in and Around the “Great Sea”
Jennifer Schnabel (Ohio State University)
Pamela Bedore. The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Crime Fiction
Rachel Schaffer (Montana State University Billings)
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