Crime Fiction and National Identities in the Global Age

To read a crime novel today largely simulates the exercise of reading newspapers or watching the news. The speed and frequency with which today’s bestselling works of crime fiction are produced allow them to mirror and dissect nearly contemporaneous socio-political events and conflicts. This collection examines this phenomenon and offers original, critical, essays on how national identity appears in international crime fiction in the age of populism and globalization. These essays address topics such as the array of competing nationalisms in Europe; Indian secularism versus Hindu communalism; the populist rhetoric tinged with misogyny or homophobia in the United States; racial, religious or ethnic others who are sidelined in political appeals to dominant native voices; and the increasing economic chasm between a rich and poor. More broadly, these essays inquire into themes such as how national identity and various conceptions of masculinity are woven together, how dominant native cultures interact with migrant and colonized cultures to explore insider/outsider paradigms and identity politics, and how generic and cultural boundaries are repeatedly crossed in postcolonial detective fiction.

Julie H. Kim is a professor of English at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. She teaches and publishes in early modern British and contemporary British and American literatures.

Edited by Julie H. Kim

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 269
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2020
pISBN: 978-1-4766-7715-6
eISBN: 978-1-4766-4042-6
Imprint: McFarland

Introduction: National Identity and International Crime Fiction in the Age of Populism and Globalization (Julie H. Kim) 1
Getting Fooled Again by Populism: Detecting the Origins of American Hate in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam (Tim Libretti) 13
Australian Crime Fiction: Such Is Life for ­Hard-Boiled Larrikins (Janice Shaw) 35
Beyond Machismo/Beyond Modernity: Imagining a Postnational Society in Domingo Villar’s Inspector Caldas Novels (Heath A. Diehl) 57
Black Money, Gray Skies: Financial Crimes in Modern Icelandic Thrillers (Jean Gregorek) 77
Imagined Geographies and Colonial Marginals in Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (Somdatta Bhattacharya) 101
“A new beginning for good people”: National Identity and the New South Africa in Deon Meyer’s Crime Fiction (Colette Guldimann) 115
Sacred Games: The Interplay of Nationalism and Existentialism in a Multicultural Nation (Somali Saren) 138
“Congress has never heard a voice like mine”: Law, Legal Fictions and National Legal Culture in Native American Detective Writing (Alexandra Hauke) 161
Memory, Witnessing and Race at the End of the World: Rick Moody’s “The Albertine Notes” as Metaphysical Detective Fiction (Andrew Hock Soon Ng) 188
From Istanbul to the East End in the Work of Barbara Nadel (Peter Clandfield) 209
The Global Hybridity of Sherlock Holmes (Neil McCaw) 233
About the Contributors 255
Index 257