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This is part of our crime fiction in translation blog series, showcasing some of the best crime fiction (historical and modern) the non-English speaking world has to offer. Each post will focus on a text or series from a different culture, so stay tuned to expand your reading horizons. Contact [email protected] with recommendations for where/when the series should go next, or send us your own blog post about your country’s/country of research’s crime fiction.
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 I admit that I was not always a devotee of crime fiction. My academic training focused on American Modernism, and the fact that this period coincided with the “golden age” of crime fiction and the hard-boiled revolution was well obscured in the literary history I was gathering for myself. There were no explicit prohibitions in my program against delving into genre fiction—in fact, one of my dissertation committee members would go on to write a well-received crime novel—but I had gleaned an implicit message that the way to win respect in academia was to focus on the long-established signifiers of credibility. The closest I came to working on genre fiction was a course on the nineteenth-century gothic novel. This is the first in a new blog series on crime fiction in translation, showcasing some of the best crime fiction (historical and modern) the non-English-speaking world has to offer. Each post will focus on a text or series from a different culture, so stay tuned to expand your crime fiction reading horizons. Contact [email protected] with recommendations for where/when the series should go next, or send us your own blog post about your country’s/country of research’s crime fiction. In 2021, Lupin became the first French tv series to reach the top 10 streamed shows on Netflix in America, eventually nominated for both the International Emmy and Golden Globe Awards. Currently on its third season, and with a fourth on the way, Lupin is heavily inspired by a cornerstone of historical French crime fiction. His name is Arsène Lupin: France’s ‘national thief’ (Leblanc 7).
 Netflix’s Ripley (2024) is a fascinating rendering of Patricia Highsmith’s respected crime fiction The Talented Mr Ripley, which has already previously received a celebrity-heavy film adaptation (1999). The series pays an unmistakable tribute to classic film noir by calling back the latter’s high-contrast, black-and-white cinematography and scenic preferences for stairs and midnight streets. It also recreates the morally ambiguous protagonist commonly seen in the genre: Tom Ripley, a small-time con artist, is sent to Italy to retrieve a wealthy man’s wayward son, Dickie. But instead of bringing him back, Tom becomes obsessed with Dickie’s life–imitating him, trying on his clothes, then trying to become him. Elizabeth A. Hatmaker and Christopher Breu argue that Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley represents the imposter narrative prevalent in post-war American noir fiction (38-39). Focusing on the tropes of identity theft and masquerade, this group of works express anxiety towards the loss of a heroic masculinity as fight-till-death soldiers come home and become generic suburban middle-class with office jobs. A man can be any man now: they are all the same. Highsmith, however, performs a queer inversion of this narrative by highlighting how her gay-coded protagonist is fixated on another man’s identity that is inherently ‘a performance based primarily on the accumulation of aesthetic objects’ (38). This queer perspective is rendered more explicit by the audiovisual medium of Ripley, which emphasises the visual aspect of gender, thereby portraying masculinity as a gender expression to be seen and imitated.
I love to kill people. I love to watch them die. I would shoot them in the head and they would wiggle and squirm all over the place, and then just stop. Or I would cut them with a knife and watch their faces turn real white. I love all that blood.
- Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker” “A silly game:” Playing ‘Murder in the Dark’ in Ada Moncrieff’s Murder at Maybridge Castle (2023)5/12/2023  Many detective stories use physical gameplay elements as a setup for the narrated murder mystery. One famous example is Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table which focuses heavily on the game Bridge. Other games equally lend themselves to mysteries: jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, chess, and even a variety of sports. One reader favourite is the ‘murder game,’ or ‘murder in the dark’: guests are invited to a dinner or a couple of days in a hotel during which a murder performance is acted out, giving them the chance to play at being investigators. It is an intellectual challenge for the guests with no other aim than having fun and harmless competition – until, of course, a real murder happens, and everybody is a suspect. One recent example of this setup is Ada Moncrieff’s latest Christmas mystery, Murder at Maybridge Castle. Charles, the new owner of the castle, has turned it into a hotel and markets it as haunted, appealing to spiritualists and sceptics alike. On a weekend in December, he invites a selection of guests to the Cumbrian countryside to celebrate the castle’s opening, with a programme consisting of a tarot card reading, a visit to the witch burial grounds near the castle, a séance – and a supposedly innocent game of murder in the dark which, however, soon turns serious when one of the guests meets an untimely end.
 My new book, Crafting Crime Fiction (2023), is my first full length work of non-fiction. I wrote it straight after I wrote two three book crime fiction series in under six years (The Goodwin Crime Family series for Little, Brown in the UK, and the Hotel Inspector series for Kampa Verlag in German). I felt almost fiction-ed out. I needed a pause from the imaginary world. I also thought it was time to consider not just what writing and reading crime fiction meant to me, but how I approached the writing and teaching of it (as a longstanding creative writing professor). Maybe this could be of benefit to others.
 I was fortunate to be pointed toward this 1967 novel by Anne Billson, who wrote the introduction to this new edition. It’s a wonderful example of the flexibility of the crime genre. White employs familiar tropes to unfamiliar ends, brings in the mythic and the folkloric without attracting attention to the fact, even drawing on that hoary lynchpin of adolescent brutality, Lord of the Flies, without allowing the weight of it to drag down her own singular skillset.
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