THE ASSOCIATION BLOG

Dorothy L. Sayers, on the Occasion of her 128th Birthday by Eric Sandberg

13/6/2021

To celebrate the 128th Birthday of Dorothy L. Sayers, we've asked Dr. Eric Sandberg to give us a glimpse into the life and legacy of this prolific writer and critic, and her wider impact on one of the most fruitful periods in the history of crime fiction.

The next volume in the prestigious McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series is now available for preorder. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction by Eric Sandberg (no. 11 in the series) looks at the life and work of the creator of sleuths Lord Peter Wimsey and Montague Egg.

Artifactuality in Mindhunter (2017) by Emily Farmer

8/6/2021

By virtue of its very nature, true crime suggests to its consumers that its content is innately true. Convincing the consumer of this “truth” is dependent on a variety of factors, one of which is its initial visual presentation to the consumer. One way of presenting the consumer with “authenticity” is to reassure them through a persuasive book jacket. John Douglas and Mark Olshaker’s 1995 Mindhunter: Inside the FBI Elite Serial Crime Unit (updated in 2017 in anticipation of Netflix’s 2017 series Mindhunter) is one striking example of this artifice at work.

Kantian Ethics and the ‘Nice Guy’ in Promising Young Woman (2020) by Ffion Davies

24/5/2021

Promising Young Woman (2020) is a brutal, uncomfortable, and profoundly upsetting narrative which masterfully displays the ubiquity of rape culture in contemporary Western society. A rape-revenge without a single rape scene (which is quite a feat in itself), the film reflects some of the ugliest aspects of internalised misogyny—so horrifying precisely for their insidious nature and often causing the most significant damage while masquerading as allyship. Frankly, I could write a book on the nuances of gender politics in this film, but for this brief blog post, I will focus on Fennell’s portrayal and subsequent critique of the well-worn concept of the nice guy.

On Re-Watching The Wire by Eric Sandberg

7/5/2021

The first season of David Simon’s ground-breaking, landmark police drama The Wire aired on HBO in the summer of 2002. I first saw it on a DVD box set – that short-lived technological victim of streaming services – a few years later when I was working on my PhD (on Virginia Woolf) in Edinburgh. I had more time than money, and a box set rental from Vogue Video on Clerk Street (long may it be remembered) cost a lot less, and lasted a lot longer than a night in the pub.

Conrad’s The Secret Agent: A Tale of Modern State Terrorism by Nadia Terki

10/4/2018

While Conrad has been referred to in the very aftermath of 9/11 to draw attention to the parallels with Russian Anarchism that his writings (especially The Secret Agent (1907)) reflect, there is still a lack of thorough examination of the way Conrad’s novel reflects those links. General statements in articles or newspapers usually state the existence and the validity of this connection, but do not provide corresponding and necessary analysis of the novel and the way it can be read in light of the post-Cold War and 9/11 periods. Yet, the very fact that there are passing references to the relation between The Secret Agent and contemporary terrorism works as a relevant and necessary foundation for the analysis that concerns Conrad’s narratives and the pre-9/11 period.

Drug Trafficking in Mexican Crime Fiction by Agustin Cadena

22/1/2018

Since the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ was launched in 2006, Mexico has become the most violent country among those which are not officially at war. The Mexican government recently released data showing that between 2007 and 2014 – a period that accounts for some of the bloodiest years of the nation’s war against drug cartels – more than 164,000 people were victims of homicide. The numbers seem to have decreased, but not substantially.

Now, if we examine the news, we realise that most of the drug traffic related violence takes place in rural areas or in small towns. The question would be: how is it, then, that most novels of the ongoing Mexican crime fiction boom are set in an urban context?

Lady Charlotte Holmes, Consulting Detective by Annette Wren

4/1/2018

In 2014, the legal case Klinger vs. Conan Doyle Estate officially released the character of Sherlock Holmes from copyright. Surprisingly, the judge ruled in favor of placing the character within public domain because keeping Sherlock Holmes under copyright would “make it more difficult or more expensive for future artists to work, since a great deal of art draws on earlier works” (Schultz).

A mere two years later, Sherry Thomas introduced readers to Lady Charlotte Holmes, protagonist of the Lady Holmes Series set in Victorian London, so far consisting of A Study in Scarlet Women (2016) and A Conspiracy in Belgravia (2017). The significance of Lady Charlotte Holmes lies in Thomas’s adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, and exemplifies Schultz’s point that kicking the detective out of copyright enables artists to explore freely their interpretations of Conan Doyle’s most popular creation.

The Timeless Nature of Agatha Christie: Cosy or Cruel? by Jennie Marchand

30/10/2017

Agatha Christie is a woman with one of the best literary badges a writer could hope for: best-selling author of all time. With a career spanning over 50 years, producing 66 detective novels and two of the most enduring detectives, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot in crime fiction, she has sold over 4 billion copies and her ‘whodunit’ fiction is still widely read and discussed today.

So what is it about Christie’s writing that resonates with her readers?

Murakami and the Hardboiled Detective by Rhys Tyers

16/10/2017

The detective story has always been a game played between the author and the reader. It creates a world where logic, reason and process lead inevitably to motives, solutions, and the perpetrator. In a world that has become more and more complex, the traditional detective story reassures readers with logical plots that have the ability to “deliver us from evil and lead us toward the broad daylight of understanding [and] towards a restoration of the social order that the crime had so violently disturbed” (Bertens 196). The genre is also attractive to the writer as it provides a pattern to follow, a well-worn template that offers identifiable tropes as well as scope for invention and creative interpretation. For Murakami, it was a window into another culture, another way of life.

Crime Fiction in the Postcolonial World by Molly Slavin

20/9/2017

When Joseph Conrad’s Charles Marlow recounts his experience in the Belgian Congo, one of the most troubling scenes comes when he sees enslaved Africans at the first colonial station he comes to. The men are being forced to labor, ostensibly because they represent a danger to the colonists, but Marlow thinks to himself, “these men could by no stretch of the imagination be called enemies. They were called criminals and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from over the sea” (13). Marlow’s realization that European law has classified the colonized as criminals, largely for merely existing, points the reader to one of the key injustices of colonialism: the language of crime has been used to solidify the imperial project and European domination.

International Crime Fiction: Ireland by Cathy Brown

15/5/2017

When asked why he chose to set his first crime novel in the US, Irish writer John Connolly said, ‘Because in Ireland everybody would’ve known who done it within days.’ Exaggeration aside, in the pre-Celtic Tiger landscape of Ireland, this may well have been the case, but it certainly isn’t nowadays as Irish crime fiction appears to be in its prime and becoming a genre of its own to rival our Scandinavian counterparts.