Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2025)

BACK ISSUE
This is a single back issue only. To order a current subscription, or for more information, please visit the journal’s web page at CluesJournal.com. Back issues from earlier volumes of Clues are available for order subject to availability.  Also, single issues of the current volume may be ordered one at a time. Individuals may order back issues directly from our online catalog, and the charge for individuals is $30 (excluding postage). Issues from Volume 33 to the present are also available in ebook format on Kindle, Nook and Google Play.

The charge for single issues for institutions is $75 per issue (excluding postage). If your institution requires a back issue, please contact us to order at the appropriate rate.

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.

• “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).

Executive Editor Caroline Reitz
Managing Editor Elizabeth Foxwell
Consulting Editor Margaret Kinsman
Format: softcover (7 x 10), back issue
Pages: 113
Copyright Date: 2025
ISSN 0742-4248
Imprint: McFarland

Introduction: Insight into Messy Truths       Caroline Reitz       5
The executive editor of Clues discusses this issue’s Table of Contents, including a teaching forum on detective fiction in the multilingual classroom and essays on Agatha Christie, Len Deighton, Dashiell Hammett, Peter Høeg, the femme fatale, older female figures in domestic noir dubbed “toxic,” and Ukrainian crime fiction.

Ukrainian Crime Fiction: Trends, Themes, Traditions       Svitlana (Lana) Krys       9
This article traces the development of crime fiction in Ukraine: its origins in the gothic literary movement, main authors, historical memory and colonial traumas, role as an instrument of Ukraine’s cultural diplomacy, limited presence in the Soviet era, and proliferation following Ukraine’s independence.

Sympathy for the Devil: Failed Catharsis and Universal Guilt in Agatha Christie’s Curtain       Emilie Laurent       25
Reading Christie’s Curtain as a depiction of an ideological battle between good and evil, this essay analyzes the novel as a manipulation of the reader’s moral judgment that dissolves the genre’s ­over-optimistic promise of restoration to social order and generates anxiety about a possible guilt located within the reader’s self.

Dangerous Skepticism and the Challenge of Acknowledgment in Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow       Christine Hamm       37
This essay argues that crime fiction can encourage readings of literature that differ from those criticized by Rita Felski (2015) as outcomes of a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Tracing motivations for and effects of skepticism at the plot level, Nordic noir such as Smilla’s Sense of Snow promotes acknowledgment rather than “critique.”

Pie in the Sky: Political Readings of Dashiell Hammett’s “Faith”       Jacob A. Zumoff       48
This essay examines “Faith,” a short story by Dashiell Hammett unpublished in his lifetime, exploring its relationship to detective fiction, proletarian fiction, and literary modernism. The story’s setting suggests a ­left-wing perspective yet resists easy political categorization, contributing to our understanding of Hammett’s evolving literary approach to detective fiction and complex relationship to ­left-wing politics and modernism.

A Woman Agent in the Male World of the Cold War Spy Novel: The Case of Len Deighton’s Fiona Samson       Howard Mason       60
This essay discusses Len Deighton’s Fiona Samson, a female agent with strong character traits who is working for the West during the Cold War. Samson’s womanhood and femininity, as well as her love of husband and family, eventually take precedence over her agency as a professional intelligence officer.

Killing a Phantom—or Resurrecting Her? Reclaiming the Femme Fatale in Contemporary U.S. and UK Noir Fiction       Suzanne A. Solomon       73
The femme fatale’s development in contemporary U.S. and UK noir fiction differs from ­hard-boiled fiction’s female investigator, who embodies a range of intersectional identities. This article posits that institutional inequities in U.S./UK publishing and a focus on a white, female, and ­middle-class readership have enabled a postfeminist recuperation of the femme fatale.

Bad Grandmas: Domestic Noir, Ageism, and the Toxic Matriarch       Roberta Garrett       87
This article argues that although cozy crime offers positive roles for ­post-menopausal women, domestic thrillers often depict them as arrogant villains who torment younger heroines. It proposes that the cycle’s animosity toward older women derives from a distorted, ­media-fueled view that the current generation of boomer women are lazy and overprivileged.

TEACHING FORUM: Crime Fiction in the Multilingual Classroom
Guest Editors: Barbara Pezzotti, with Rachel Schaffer and Ciara Gorman
The Detective as Historian, Crime Fiction as Alternative Historiography       Maria Novella Mercuri       99
The article relates the experience of teaching an undergraduate course based on novels by Daeninckx, Vázquez Montalbán, and Vichi that are as much a social history of their times as well as ­well-plotted and ­well-written crime fiction works.

Crossing the Crime Scene: The Case of Gaslight       Alessandra Calanchi       102
In crime fiction courses, students cannot grasp the extent of psychological pressure, the danger of evil, or the importance of rational behavior without necessary involvement. Discussed here is coursework involving the film Gaslight (dir. George Cukor, 1944), where, although no murder occurs, the crime scene is spread all over the story and remains relevant today.

Decolonizing and Indigenizing the Study of Crime Fiction       Carlos Uxo       106
Australia’s Indigenous Voice Referendum (2023) and the adoption of a robust decolonizing approach by Monash University provided an ideal background to explore representations of indigeneity in crime fiction, focusing on the Mexican novel The Uncomfortable Dead (What’s Missing Is Missing) by Subcomandante Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

From Paris to Corsica: The Pedagogical Power of Crime Fiction in Multilingual Contexts       Carolyn Stott and Clara Sitbon       109
The authors discuss how they focus on multilingualism in the French crime fiction classroom in Australia. The ­short-story format incorporating texts from across different regions helps students understand the multilingual and multicultural complexities and differences in the Francophone world.

Understanding Complexity, Hybridity, and Atmosphere in German Crime Fiction       Christiane Weller       113
This article discusses the teaching of Germanophone crime fiction in a multilingual classroom, examining whether notions of hybridity and atmosphere can help students understand works outside of their linguistic and cultural skill set. The TV series Babylon Berlin elucidates how a sophisticated, multilayered textual structure can be decoded through an atmospheric reading.

Assessment in the Multilingual Crime Fiction Classroom: Mapping the Genre’s Transnationality       Stewart King       116
This essay describes the design of an assessment task, in which ­third-year university students employ their ­discipline-specific linguistic and cultural knowledge to produce a map that foregrounds the genre’s inherent transnationality.

The Role of the Creative Assignment in Italian Detective Fiction Courses       Gianmarco Bocchi       119
The creative assignment option for students in ­university-level detective fiction courses can boost student creativity, involve critical thinking, and enable learners to reflect on the genre’s evolution since its inception. It also allows students to engage with and identify the key features of detective fiction on global and local scales.

Guilty Pleasure? Decolonizing the Curriculum Through Hispanic Crime Narratives       Carolina Miranda       122
Incorporating Hispanic crime narratives and others produced in other cultures into comparative or multicultural coursework provides an excellent opportunity to challenge ­Anglo-centric perspectives, decolonize the curriculum, and discuss historical events that haunt society. By scrutinizing crime and its representations, students are invited to reflect upon cultural, historical, and political debates.

Book REVIEWS
Rebecca Rego Barry. The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells: Investigations into a Forgotten Mystery Author       Anissa M. Graham       125
Molly Slavin. Criminal Cities: The Postcolonial Novel and Cathartic Crime       Pamela Bedore       126
Barbara Pezzotti. Mediterranean Crime Fiction: Transcultural Narratives in and Around the “Great Sea”       Jennifer Schnabel       128
Pamela Bedore. The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Crime Fiction       Rachel Schaffer       129

Author Guidelines are on page 131.