2020 Book Prize Runner Up: The Disabled Detective by Susannah B. Mintz

As promised at our online event in November, we will be reviewing both of the runners up of the 2020 ICFA Book Prize on our association blog. 

​First up, ​Susannah B. Mintz's The Disabled Detective: Sleuthing Disability in Contemporary Crime Fiction (2020) reviewed by ​Dr. Linda Ledford-Miller. 

​With The Disabled Detective. Sleuthing Disability in Contemporary Crime Fiction, Susannah B. Mintz explores a neglected are of crime fiction: detectives of print and screen whose disabilities not only do not prevent them from efficient detecting, but may, in fact, contribute to their success.

Fans of detective fiction of course recognize the frequent strangeness in the behavior of Sherlock Holmes, whose conditions, or defects, include drug addiction and anti-social behavior. A modern Holmes would no doubt be diagnosed as “on the spectrum,” or perhaps with Asperger syndrome.
 
Mintz tracks detectives with blindness or visual disability, the deaf or auditorily impaired, the “crip sleuths”-- investigators missing a hand or arm--, and those with mental divergence, or intellectual or cognitive disabilities such as autism. She examines works from the early twentieth century to contemporary television. After an introduction that connects to Edgar Allen Poe’s Dupin, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie’s Poiret, Mintz organizes her chapters by disability. “Seer Detectives, “Deafness and the Penetrating Detective,” The Crip Sleuths,” and “The Missing Arm of the Law” are self-evident. The final chapter, “Detection and the Mind’s Private Eye,” includes detectives with a wide range of  mental or cognitive conditions, including amnesia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette’s syndrome, and epilepsy, among “Neuro  disorders.” No matter what the impairment, these detectives “defy normative modes of gathering information” (57). Some are well known (Monk, Lincoln Rhymes, Poirot) and some relatively unknown (Thornley Colton, Annabelle Hardy), but Mintz makes a compelling argument about alternative paths to the construction of knowledge, or to solving a crime, at the same time that she argues for crime fiction as a focus of literary disability studies. 

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Author Biography
Dr. Linda Ledford-Miller recently retired from teaching and committees, but not from academic endeavors. 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)