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Crime fiction laboured for many years under a persistent foundational anxiety over its cultural status. However, the cultural landscape has changed considerably in recent years, and many critics have identified a transformation in crime fiction's positioning as central to this transformation. This essay examines this claim by first looking at several ways in which crime fiction works well with a number of recent attempts to described key tendencies in contemporary literary production including its global view, its interest in the past, and its interstitial nature. It then locates crime fiction within the process known in Russian formalist terms as ‘canonization of the junior branch’ by which lower-status genres influence or indeed replace higher-status genres. Finally, in an attempt to trace the extent of this infiltration, the essay examines book reviews, festivals, and literary prizes for evidence that crime fiction has indeed achieved improved status both within a range of national cultures and internationally.
This article investigates the contemporary fascination with true crime narratives, an subject which is fast becoming a central area of interest in crime fiction studies. As the overarching genre of crime fiction itself becomes the most read literature genre, not to mention its growing popularity in other popular cultural mediums – TV, film, documentary, podcast, blogs, etc., true crime – which has always been a popular sub-genre – is arguably moving centre stage aligned to our recent obsession with the real life figure of the serial killer. The usual discussions of both individual and collective obsession and fascination with such topics, is generally limited to arguments within conscious parameters of ethical choice, This paper will explore an alterative reading that introduces the Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of the sinthome and jouissance, and argues that any reading of these topics cannot be contained within conceptions of rationality and ethical choice.
This paper addresses one question: What makes detective series popular today? In the past, scholars have responded that the genre is mainly focused on plot, to the point of becoming a narrative prototype. This approach explains why detective fiction appears to be more limited in its proliferation across media than other genres such as fantasy or science fiction. If plot is the dominant feature of the genre, and plot somehow works against proliferation, then why are we still producing and consuming so many detective series? Following Marie-Laure Ryan, I wish to argue that a shift from plot to worldbuilding has occurred in detective fiction. This shift follows the evolution of narrative theory which in the last decades had to expand to other disciplines and media. In the same way that narratology embraced the new concept of ‘world,’ popular series have adopted its potential to proliferate, an aptitude that is now truly part of its aesthetics and poetics. I want to describe and understand the increasingly important role played by storyworlds in detective fiction so as to better apprehend how popular series are made in our cultural era of mass media production.
Recent Nordic crime fiction contains numerous amateur detectives who are professional journalists. Their presence is partly explained by the shared roots and formal affinities of crime reportage and crime fiction, and by the journalistic backgrounds of many Nordic crime writers. However, the rise of the journalist-investigator as a rival to traditional police detectives is also a mark of growing distrust in the competence of the Nordic welfare state and its officials. Nordic journalist-investigators are typically crusading reporters motivated by a desire to uncover and prevent social injustice, including the neglect and abuse of vulnerable social groups by absent, incompetent or corrupt public officials. In acting as moral guardians of social justice, journalist-investigators carry out the principle of the press as a fourth estate, designed to check state power by publicising abuses of authority, and signal a possible shift from the welfare state towards a civil society. However, this role is also compromised by the ethical dilemmas journalist-investigators face between the demands of uncovering information, protecting vulnerable witnesses, informing the public, preventing crime and meeting commercial imperatives. These conflicts spotlight troubling tendencies within crime fiction and crime reportage: both kinds of writing are underpinned by a narrative structure of anticipation, suspense and dramatic revelation and premised upon the reader's voyeuristic investment in sensational subjects.
This paper seeks to understand how crime fiction connects with the neuroscientific turn occurring in society and culture today. It argues the genre has inherent ties to the science, technology, and biopolitical imperatives underpinning the neuroscientific turn, and is thus uniquely suited to exploring and challenging the ethical considerations arising from it. The paper highlights the symbiotic relationship between crime fiction and neuroscientific models, in which the particularities of the genre are employed by science while science influences the forms of crime fiction. Looking particularly at recent crime novels focussing on types of dementia, it explores how they affect expected generic endings to mount an ideological critique of a strictly medical and material model of identity formation. It does this through a re-working of today's hegemonic model of brain health, dominated by discourses of ‘neuroplasticity,’ looking in particular at how crime fiction can help us to think differently about cognitive differences and diseases.
Contemporary German-language techno thrillers by Tom Hillenbrand and Marc Elsberg invite readers to imagine a future marked by constant surveillance and predictive technology. New models of data mining and risk assessment are being used to inform decisions and trigger actions, but due to their complete reliance on digital data, they are open to being hacked and gamed. Lack of privacy, an elimination of boundaries between actual reality and the virtual world, and a blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction impacts both crime and detection; it has ramifications on the way we will solve crimes as well as on the types of crime that will be committed. Techno thrillers are uniquely positioned to explore moral grey areas in a security landscape affected by widespread globalisation and neoliberal privatisation, and to map possible developments in imaginative ways. They are today's globalised genre par excellence. These thrillers, that for linguistic reasons have escaped consideration in crime fiction scholarship, reflect and respond to crucial discussions about security, (virtual) reality, and artificial intelligence that are of utmost concern in our rapidly changing world.
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