The Foreign in International Crime Fiction

Transcultural Representations

Description

‘The foreigner’ is a familiar character in popular crime fiction, from the foreign detective whose outsider status provides a unique perspective on a familiar or exotic location to the xenophobic portrayal of the criminal ‘other’. Exploring popular crime fiction from across the world, The Foreign in International Crime Writing examines these popular works as ‘transcultural contact zones’ in which writers can tackle such issues as national identity, immigration, globalization and diaspora communities. Offering readings of 20th and 21st century crime writing from Norway, the UK, India, China, Europe and Australasia, the essays in this book open up new directions for scholarship on crime writing and transnational literatures.

Table of Contents

Contributors Introduction Part 1: Inside Out or Outside In? The Scene of the Crime as Exotic Décor Chapter 1: Cannibalistic Maori Behead Rupert Murdoch: (Mis)representations of Antipodean Otherness in Caryl Férey’s ‘Maori Thrillers Ellen Carter and Deborah Walker Chapter 2: ‘A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world’: Britishness and Foreignness in le Carré’s Karla Trilogy Sabine Vanacker Chapter 3: Havana Noir: Time, Place and the Appropriation of Cuba in Crime Fiction Philip Swanson Chapter 4: Shanghai, Shanghai: Placing Qiu Xiaolong’s Crime Fiction in the Landscape of Globalized Literature Hui Luo Chapter 5: Seeing Double: Representing Others in the Franco-Pacific Thriller Jean Anderson Part 2: Private Eyes, Hybrid Eyes: The In-Between Detective Chapter 6: ‘Don’t Forget the Tejedor’: Community and Identity in the Crime Fiction of Rosa Ribas Stewart King Chapter 7: An American in Paris or Opposites Attract: Dominique Sylvain’s ‘In-Between’Bicultural Detective Stories France Grenaudier-Klijn Chapter 8: Arthur Upfield and Philip McLaren: Pioneering Partners in Australian Ethnographic Crime Fiction John and Marie Ramsland Chapter 9: From Wolf to Wolf-Man: Foreignness and Self-Alterity in Fred Vargas’s L’Homme à l’envers Alistair Rolls Chapter 10: Others Knowing Others: Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas Chapter 11: Smog, Tweed and Foreign Bedevilment: Bourland’s Twenty-First-Century Remake of the Sherlock Holmes Crime Story Keren Chiaroni Part 3: When Evil Walks Abroad – Towards a Politics of Otherness Chapter 12: ‘The Meanest Devil of the Pit’: British Representations of the German Character in Edwardian Juvenile Spy Fiction, 1900–1914 Andrew Francis Chapter 13. Reading Others: Foreigners and the Foreign in Roberto Arlt’s Detective Fiction Carolina Miranda Chapter 14: Who is the Foreigner? The Representation of the Migrant in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction Barbara Pezzotti Chapter 15: Images of Turks in Recent German Crime Fiction: A Comparative Study in Xenophobia Margaret Sutherland 16. The Representation of Chinese Characters in Leonardo Padura’s La cola de la serpiente (2000): Sinophobia or Sinophilia? Carlos Uxó Bibliography Index

Carolina Miranda is Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.