Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Fall 2024)

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Caroline Reitz, Clues executive editor, is associate professor in the Department of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY and the CUNY Graduate Center. Editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four and former editor of Dickens Studies Annual, she focuses her research on Victorian studies, theory of the novel, nationalism, feminist theory, crime, and empire.
Managing Editor Elizabeth Foxwell, an Agatha Award winner, serves as managing editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection and is an editor at McFarland.
Margaret Kinsman, consulting editor of Clues and 2016 Raven Award recipient, is a visiting research fellow in popular culture at London South Bank University, United Kingdom. She has published numerous articles related to crime fiction and has presented papers and chaired panels at international conferences.

Executive Editor Caroline Reitz
Managing Editor Elizabeth Foxwell
Consulting Editor Margaret Kinsman
Format: softcover (7 x 10)
Pages:
Bibliographic Info:
Copyright Date:
ISSN 0742-4248
Imprint: McFarland

Introduction: BIPOC Female Detectives in a Global Context
sam naidu 5
The guest editor discusses the rationale for and content of this Clues theme issue, including articles on the TV series Brooklyn ­Nine-Nine and the work of Eleanor Taylor Bland, Oyinkan Braithwaite, K’im Ch’aehŭi, Maria L.M. ­Fres-Felix, Pauline Hopkins, Tiffany D. Jackson, Vaseem Khan, Angela Makholwa, Marcia Muller, BarbaraNeely, Nnedi Okorafor, and Kwei Quartey.

“Or my name ain’t Venus Johnson”: The Birth of Pauline Hopkins’ Black Female Detective in Hagar’s Daughter
andrea tinnemeyer 9
Pauline Hopkins’ Hagar’s Daughter (serialized 1901–03) meditates on detective fiction’s potential to offer agency and ­self-created potential for a Black woman in Jim Crow times. The result is a liberating use of genre that not only celebrates the prowess of its detective, Venus Johnson, but also affirms the knowledge that flows from Black women and their communities.
Night Girl and the ­Nate-Rock: Material Feminisms and Double Consciousness in BarbaraNeely’s Blanche on the Lam
lisa koyuki smith 21
This study focuses on BarbaraNeely’s Blanche on the Lam (1992), exploring Neely’s material feminisms avant la lettre, their connection to W.E.B. Du Bois’s articulation of double consciousness, narratological understandings of the detective genre, and narratives of racial passing that express the discursive and material complexity of race relations in the United States.
Listen to the Silence: Reconsidering Race in Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone ­Hard-boiled Detective Novels
alexander n. howe 33
This article examines the development of the Native identity of Marcia Muller’s female private eye, Sharon McCone. McCone initially is identified with ­one-eighth Shoshone heritage. In Listen to the Silence (2000), McCone learns of her adoption and the membership of her birth parents in the Shoshone Nation. The series’ second half explores McCone’s Native identity, and contemporary Native experience, with increasing nuance and detail.
“You are a Symbol, Persis”: The Complexity of Postcolonial and Feminist Progress in Vaseem Khan’s Malabar House Series
sophie-constanze bantle 46
Vaseem Khan’s Malabar House series presents 1950s India as rife with opportunity and difficulty. ­Post-independence feminist and postcolonial emancipation is portrayed as a complicated and ongoing process, mirrored in discussions around Persis’ status as a symbol. Persis combats her society’s social problems, providing an example of agency in the face of oppression.
Crimetime: Toughness, Gender, and Genre in Philippine Detective Fiction
nicole kenley 57
This article reads Maria L.M. ­Fres-Felix’s collection of stories featuring Filipina detective SJ Tuason, Crimetime, to explore Tuason’s performance of ­gender-neutral toughness as a policing mechanism in Quezon City. Tuason uses toughness to expose and combat the culturally specific systems of corruption in the Philippines that contribute to antifeminist structures and violent crimes against women.
Grandma Detectives in Korea: Older Women Against the Crime of the “Silver Market”
june oh 70
This essay investigates the characterization of “grandma detectives” in K’im Ch’aehŭi’s Grandma Detective Trio (Halmasi T’amjŏng T’ŭrio, 2022) and these characters’ particular setting to show how their marginal position as older women with disabilities allows them to perform and negotiate the tropes of Korean detective fiction.
Ambiguous Female Figures in African Noir: Subversion or Submission?
sam naidu 85
African noir authors Angela Makholwa (Red Ink) and Kwei Quartey (The Missing American) focus on ­gender-based violence in the African locations of Johannesburg and Accra. They therefore inscribe deliberately ambiguous female detective figures that represent subversion of and submission to dominant social and generic conventions.
The Detectives Who Kill: Black Female Detectives in the Works of Oyinkan Braithwaite and Nnedi Okorafor
emily chow-quesada 98
Works by Oyinkan Braithwaite and Nnedi Okorafor demonstrate the lethal duality of their Black detectives who are also killers. This duality sets the detectives apart, allowing them to pursue justice and defend the rights of others. The analysis shows how African crime fiction by Black female writers in the ­twenty-first century intertwines gender and sociopolitical discourses.
Seriously Different: Divergent Representations of the Latina Detective in Brooklyn ­Nine-Nine
delia poey 110
This study situates two Latina characters from the television series Brooklyn ­Nine-Nine within multiple contexts including Latinas on screen(s), the female detective, and transgressive representation within the sitcom genre itself. This study proposes that the use of comedy facilitates divergent representations of the female detective and Latina detective specifically.
Claudia Coleman’s One and Only Case: The Trauma of Detection in Monday’s Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson
lexey a. bartlett 121
This essay draws on narratology and contemporary analyses of ­post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma to argue that Monday’s Not Coming (2018) by Tiffany D. Jackson reflects the trauma of successful detection in its narrative structure while highlighting the inequities of attention to crime and associated trauma in BIPOC communities.
Making the Footprints: A Tribute to Eleanor Taylor Bland
norlisha crawford and caroline reitz 133
Eleanor Taylor Bland was a pioneering figure in series detective fiction by African Americans and by women. Her sleuth, Marti MacAlister, balanced a commitment to the genre and to expanding its capacities to include the personal and well as professional aspects of her characters’ lives.
Interview with Kwei Quartey
sam naidu 138
Guest editor Sam Naidu discusses with author Kwei Quartey his approach to his work, including his Black female detective Emma Djan.
REVIEWS
Kelly Ross. Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature
cynthia s. hamilton 145
Laurence W. Mazzeno. The Critical Reception of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes and Beyond
meike heinrich 147
Bernd Stiegler. Arthur Conan Doyle and Photography: Traces, Fairies, and Other Apparitions
ellen burton harrington 148
Marta Usiekniewicz. Food, Consumption, and Masculinity in American Hardboiled Fiction
david a. stivers 150
Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack, eds. Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight
anissa m. graham 151
David Riddle Watson. Truth to ­Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction
diane m. calhoun-french 153
Ruth Hawthorn and John Miller, eds. Animals in Detective Fiction
rachel schaffer 154
Clues Index, Volume 42 157
Call for Papers 165
Author Guidelines are on page 166

• “Clues is a must-have for readers and writers of crime fiction. Scholarly, thought-provoking, wide-ranging in its topics, Clues covers the crime and thriller map.”—Sara Paretsky
• “A. Conan Doyle, notoriously resentful of Sherlock Holmes’s success, liked to scorn ‘police romances’ as less significant and worthy of his talents than his other literary work. If he could have read Clues, the thinking mystery reader’s journal, he would surely have felt differently—and learned much he never realized himself about even his own landmark contribution to the genre, from which so much else by others has flowed.”—Jon Lellenberg, U.S. agent for the Arthur Conan Doyle estate
• “I love reading Clues. Every issue provides thought-provoking, well-researched articles. The variety and scope of the material found in Clues makes an unparalleled, ongoing contribution to our understanding of the role of crime fiction in our culture, and the genre’s reflection of its time and society.”—Jan Burke, Edgar-winning author of The Messenger (2009)
• “Clues is an important journal. It carries the torch of tradition that is the backbone of detective fiction. It goes below the surface and gets to the heart of what makes the genre so fascinating and valid today”—Michael Connelly, author of the Harry Bosch novels, including The Overlook (2007)
• “for erudite and fascinating truths about mysteries, follow the clues to Clues, the scholarly journal that is an essential resource for every serious student of the mystery”—Carolyn Hart, author of Death Walked In (2008)
• “with scholarship ranging from Poe to Peters, nothing beats Clues”—Joan Hess, author of Mummy Dearest (2008).