 1. What first sparked your interest in crime fiction studies?
Like most crime fiction scholars, I came to crime fiction because I’ve always liked to read the genre for fun. I started with the typical children’s crime series like The Three Investigators, the German novel series TKKG (which many German readers probably remember better as audio plays) and the Austrian novel series Die Knickerbockerbande. And then, like most scholars, I moved on to Agatha Christie and had one of my first key experiences with literature when I read And Then There Were None when I was 10. I loved it and afterwards read any of the Christies my school library and the city library had. Getting into the genre itself was really easy but when I studied literature and history, I didn’t see crime fiction being given much of a place in scholarship (mainly because we simply had no specialist in crime fiction studies at my uni at the time) and so it never occurred to me that I could actually study the genre in depth until I was nearly done with my PhD (on, as Maurizio Ascari says, a precursor of Crime Fiction – Gothic). I had taught two courses on crime fiction before because I always thought that the diversity within the genre is a fabulous vehicle to discuss discourses and social narratives besides narratology, but it took another key experience, finding the Call for Papers for the 4th Captivating Criminality Conference and attending that conference in Corsham and meeting with so many fascinating researchers, for me to decide to pursue crime fiction studies as a main focus in my research.
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 Crime Fiction Studies invites contributions for a themed issue on crime fiction and videogames. Crime and the many facts of its detection are major themes in many videogames, from cozy point-and-click games (such as the long-running Nancy Drew series) to multiple-path morality games (such as Wolf Among Us). Other games not necessarily classed as ‘mystery’ games nevertheless benefit from crime as inciting incidents or moral dilemmas, putting the player in the position of detective, perpetrator, or bystander. By examining the ideological ripples of crime fiction on this interactive storytelling medium, players are asked to engage and often embody themes of justice, morality and crime through avatars and gameplay, offering fruitful avenues for considering the evolution of genre into interactive and often non-linear narrative spaces. How does the element of play impact the themes and expectations of the crime genre? How do different game genres interact with, and produce commentary on, different crime-oriented literary genres?
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.
 1. What first sparked your interest in crime fiction studies? Like so many people, my first introduction to crime fiction was Agatha Christie, although I must confess that I can’t remember much about those early readings. Later, as a teenager, I really got into thrillers – Desmond Bagley, Alistair Maclean, Dick Francis. When I headed off to university, reading crime and thrillers stayed with me as a pleasure, but the idea of ‘crime fiction studies’, or studying crime fiction, just wasn’t an option. It was hard enough to find women writers, let alone popular fiction, on the undergraduate syllabus. But when I came to start a PhD on women writers’ responses to the Second World War, I picked up Dorothy L. Sayers – paying attention to the way her preoccupations changed and her fiction in some sense anticipated the conflict. It was such a pleasure to work with her texts and to start reading the growing critical literature on crime fiction – but it also seemed important to read Sayers outside the framework of genre, and to set her work alongside other women writers of the period, be they modernist or middlebrow. As a result, I ended up with a thesis that ran the gamut from Sayers to Woolf. Emerging the other side of the PhD, though, I felt liberated (who doesn’t?!): I wanted to have a break from thinking about war and felt free now to engage more directly with the crime genre. So that’s when it all came full circle, and I found myself writing about Agatha Christie, gender, sexuality, bodies and the development of the genre across the twentieth century.  The second contributor to the ICFA Q & A series is Professor Emerita Linda Ledford-Miller!
Dr. Ledford-Miller recently retired from teaching and committees, but not from academic endeavours. She continues to work across cultures and continents according to where her interests take her. She has published widely on Travel Writing and American Minority writers. Her recent work focuses on Crime Fiction, including Robert Downey Jr.’s interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, gender roles in the In Death series by the American J.D. Robb, the village mysteries of the Canadian Louise Penny, the philosophical Inspector Espinosa series by the Brazilian Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza, and the stand alone crime novel by the Mexican Laura Esquivel, best known for the smashing success of her first novel, Like Water for Chocolate (1989). This new Q & A blog series is focused on building community within the ICFA and sharing the love of great writing that has brought us all together. Our first contributor is gender scholar Mary Evans!  Professor Mary Evans is the London School of Economics Centennial Professor at the Gender Institute at the University of Kent, and she was formerly co-editor of the European Journal of Women’s Studies. 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” CFP: "America was Never Innocent": Special issue for the Thirtieth Anniversary of James Ellroy's American Tabloid
Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2025. |
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