Chapter 6 argues that in the Mediterranean crime novel, women are scrutinised by the male gaze, their body parts being vivisected and objectified by the male detective. Focusing the investigation on the male detective and on male teams, these series fail to acknowledge societal changes in terms of female participation in work and society at large. Violence against women is frequent in these narratives, but is never framed in terms of gender violence but of racial and political (or state) violence, if not diminished into an individual crime caused by greed or deviance. The female writers analysed in this monograph also fail to address gender issues convincingly. Both Giménez Bartlett and Aykol centre their series around a female character. Yet these characters simply replicate the male gaze and objectify male characters. They are also constructed as postfeminist women who are commercially motivated and mistake consumerism for liberty. These series also fail to address gender violence, replacing the female as a victim of patriarchally engineered socio-political inequalities with the representation of villainous mother figures capable of emotional manipulation, violence and murder.

This chapter argues that, in spite of inevitable differences, Mediterranean detectives are liminal characters who belong to minority cultures and often need to negotiate their sense of belonging with the hegemonic culture. All the identity variations present in Mediterranean crime fiction are symbolic of the complex network of cultures, identities and influences that characterise the Mediterranean area. The liminality of the detective speaks of a rich and diverse cultural and literary arena in which a national hegemonic culture is often – but unsuccessfully – politically superimposed. It also speaks of a desire to unsettle the populist rhetoric that sees ‘fortress Europe’ at the centre and northern African and eastern Mediterranean countries as periphery. Chapter 1 also highlights how Mediterranean detectives are ‘intellectual’ detectives who refer to Mediterranean history, culture and myths. This characteristic has a double function: on the one hand, it emphasises transculturality as a key feature of the Mediterranean basin; on the otherhand, it promotes a discourse on the dignity of crime fiction.

The Introduction positions this book as part of the new critical move to map and interrogate crime fiction’s transnationality. The main point is to combine a sustained focus on individual texts and their particular local and national contexts with a broader, comparative approach that explores the ways in which the translation, circulation and reception of crime fiction within the Mediterranean basin produces a more complex portrait of the genre than would be possible if one just focused on national crime fictions as discrete entities. This chapter argues that by considering southern European, northern African and eastern Mediterranean crime fiction as part of a common tradition, and more importantly giving each component equal significance, this book contributes to the debate about the Western and Eurocentric dimension of world literature. This introduction also argues that, for the relatively limited dimension of the region as opposed to the global, a regional approach is able to give close attention to particular languages and specific texts, while at the same time providing ‘peripheral literature’ with more critical mass and cultural power.

This chapter examines the role that the crime novel played in exposing and, conversely, smoothing out the ill effects of capitalism, and of drawing attention to the intersections between crime, business, and the law. It argues that crime fiction’s ability to expose violent wrongdoing speaks to a wafer-thin ethical code in twentieth-century American society whereby the appearance of sanction and punishment trumps substantive claims to rightness and justice. The chapter also explores gendered and racial noir fiction, particularly in the works of the African American novelist Chester Himes. Ultimately, the chapter reveals the ambivalent politics of much American crime fiction: between, on the one hand, the desire for community and for a workable notion of the public and, on the other, the incorporation of this notion of the public by private enterprise and the allure of greed, profit, and gain.

Alan Yates was a mid-century Australian crime-writing sensation, writing more than 300 books over a career that spanned the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. Writing under the pseudonym of ‘Carter Brown’, he was published in thirty-five countries, including the United States, where his books were released by the Signet imprint of the prestigious New American Library, and his work was translated into twenty-seven languages. Yet he is now largely forgotten and, despite his impressive sales, received little recognition in Australia even at the height of his success. The lack of critical recognition afforded to Yates’s efforts largely flows from the fact that he wrote faux American mysteries and private detective fiction for Horwitz Publications, one of the largest and most dynamic of a group of Sydney pulp publishers that emerged in Australia after 1945. Yates’s career is an excellent lens through which to examine Australian pulp publishing’s operations in the context of other successful pulp authors, including its interactions with international publishing markets, as well as the author’s complex relationship with mainstream publishing, literary fashions and notions of authorial reputation in mid-century Australia.

Crime novels are central to the literary traditions and social histories of Australia. Often dismissed as cheap entertainment, these works demonstrate how the settlers of a newly conquered continent took on the task of transforming a gaol into a nation. As colonisation spread, so too did crime writers, publishers and readers. Over time the crime fiction novel became an essential vehicle for communicating ideas of right and wrong as well as ideas of what it meant to be an Australian. In a vast array of crime-focused works, the central protagonist investigates a dreadful crime while readers are asked to work through issues of class, gender and race. As stories sorted out who was guilty and innocent, authors also reveal some of the tensions within a society that still holds fast to ideals based upon egalitarianism but allows deep fractures between different social groups. Indeed, as the country marched relentlessly forward in the pursuit of progress crime novelists easily capitalised upon colonial beginnings, the rise of the metropolis and a nostalgia for the bush. In this way, authors embraced crime fiction and proved the world’s most popular genre can be refashioned to offer novels that are specifically Australian.

The third chapter considers political and social change in relation to the embattled white middle class. Through a reading of contemporary crime fiction, especially Deon Meyer, Margie Orford, Mike Nicol and Roger Smith, it argues that middle-class culture has bifurcated into liberal and illiberal strands. These strands can be examined in relation to the negotiation of the rule of law: on the one hand the detective fictions of Orford and Meyer seek, ultimately, to affirm the constitutional order; on the other hand, the noir novels of Smith and Nicol encode a cynical stance, one which understands the social contract to have been irrevocably violated. These positions are then considered in relation to shifts within the Democratic Alliance, the political party most invested in white middle-class concerns.

This chapter examines US pulp crime fiction published between the 1920s and the 1960s, focusing on its formal distinctiveness and its development. It shows how the forms of organization taken by pulp labor related to the literary forms found in the stories, exploring how the principles of fungibility and economy, recognizable from the industrial factory system of mass-production, were accommodated or challenged by two key crime writers: Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It examines how the rhythms of pulp labor intersected with the stories’ formal composition. Finally, it discusses the interpellation of a white, male, working-class readership by interwar pulp crime fiction, and the way its ideological valences were reconfigured in the postwar period by writers such as Patricia Highsmith and Chester Himes.

Focusing on two central novels by Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes and 2666, as works of crime fiction, this chapter considers them from the point of view of the rules of the detective and murder genre. The role of the detective and the construction of the puzzle emerge in each of the two novels as both a crime and a literary question. Situating the novels in the context of the impunity and violence that defined the experience of Mexico in the last three decades, the chapter proposes an alternative way to appreciate Bolaño’s depiction of violence, less as a philosophical statement about modernity and more as an ironic vision of literature and contemporary ideologies.

This chapter underscores what I will call “Mexican Miracle Modernism”; that is, the emergence of literary forms and styles tied to the rapid population growth, economic modernization, and urban development that characterized the period. The key figure to be studied is Salvador Novo, whose work is often recovered in terms of his alternative sexuality and his role as chronicler. Building on those lines of inquiry, I will claim that he is in fact the precursor of a form of urban modernism that will become central in both fictional and nonfictional narratives from the 1960s onward. The chapter will also discuss the rise of the detective novel (Rodolfo Usigli, María Elvira Bermúdez, Antonio Helú, and Luis Spota will be key) and the importance of the Mexican gothic (Rafael Bernal and Francisco Tario).

This chapter addresses the evolution of the crime fiction genre in Latin America by examining the relationship between three of the continent’s major cities and three historical moments. The following case studies chosen are: Buenos Aires in the stories of Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi (Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, 1942) by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares; Havana in Armando Cristóbal Pérez’s novel La ronda de los rubies (The Ring of Rubies, 1973); and Mexico City in Días de combate (Days of Combat, 1976) by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. The chapter traces a textual trajectory from Borges and Bioy’s parodic games with the English models of mystery fiction to Taibo’s scathing national questioning of the Mexican neo-crime fiction, passing through Cristóbal’s politically committed and Cuban revolutionary crime fiction. That trajectory demonstrates the flexibility of the crime fiction genre, which has allowed it to branch out and adapt to the literary needs of different authors and contexts in the period between 1930 and 1980 in Latin American literature.

This chapter underscores what I will call “Mexican Miracle Modernism”; that is, the emergence of literary forms and styles tied to the rapid population growth, economic modernization, and urban development that characterized the period. The key figure to be studied is Salvador Novo, whose work is often recovered in terms of his alternative sexuality and his role as chronicler. Building on those lines of inquiry, I will claim that he is in fact the precursor of a form of urban modernism that will become central in both fictional and nonfictional narratives from the 1960s onward. The chapter will also discuss the rise of the detective novel (Rodolfo Usigli, María Elvira Bermúdez, Antonio Helú, and Luis Spota will be key) and the importance of the Mexican gothic (Rafael Bernal and Francisco Tario).

This chapter addresses the evolution of the crime fiction genre in Latin America by examining the relationship between three of the continent’s major cities and three historical moments. The following case studies chosen are: Buenos Aires in the stories of Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi (Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, 1942) by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares; Havana in Armando Cristóbal Pérez’s novel La ronda de los rubies (The Ring of Rubies, 1973); and Mexico City in Días de combate (Days of Combat, 1976) by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. The chapter traces a textual trajectory from Borges and Bioy’s parodic games with the English models of mystery fiction to Taibo’s scathing national questioning of the Mexican neo-crime fiction, passing through Cristóbal’s politically committed and Cuban revolutionary crime fiction. That trajectory demonstrates the flexibility of the crime fiction genre, which has allowed it to branch out and adapt to the literary needs of different authors and contexts in the period between 1930 and 1980 in Latin American literature.

This chapter analyses the position of crime fiction in the global publishing industry. Drawing on bestseller data from nine countries across all continents, it confirms that crime fiction is prominent in the commercial top segment everywhere, but to varying degrees. The genre is most dominant in countries with strong domestic crime fiction traditions, such as the UK and the USA, and least visible in non-Western markets (e.g. Brazil and India). Data from the UK and the USA show very few bestselling crime novels in translation, unlike other book markets where bestselling translations are more common – primarily translations from English, but to a notable extent also from the Scandinavian languages. Discussion focusses on the power dynamics of global publishing, the increasingly important sector of rights sales and adaptations, author branding and serialization, and the rapid structural changes that are currently taking place in the book trade, including the increased interest in digital formats like streamed audiobooks.

The two decades between the First and Second World Wars were a period of political turbulence and social and cultural change in France. Céline and André Malraux gave voice to right- and left-wing ideologies in their work, while François Mauriac and others offered a religious perspective on contemporary mores. Formal innovations came from Surrealism and modernism, and the voices of female, black and gay writers made themselves heard more boldly than ever before: André Breton, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Colette, Irène Némirovsky and René Maran were significant literary figures of the period. At the same time, cinema and radio challenged the cultural dominance of the novel, and within literature the landscape was changed by the beginnings of the bande dessinée and the burgeoning of mass-market popular fiction, including Delly’s romance novels and Georges Simenon’s crime fiction.

This chapter investigates the uses to which climate is put in a range of Nordic noir novels and films. In the majority of such texts, climate functions as both a feature of particular locales (usually, the stark meteorological and ecological settings associated with the Nordic lands) and a way to emphasise or otherwise give aesthetic expression to human actions. Strikingly, however, a small number of texts could be identified as what Linda Rugg terms ‘ecocrime’ fiction. In these, non-human nature appears as an actant in its own right, for it figures as the victim of crime. However, criminal investigation in these texts is displaced from non-human to human victims, thus deferring inquiry into the non-human and underlining non-human nature as an aporia of meaning or as the site of trauma.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.