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Preface

Preface When my first novel, Report for Murder, was published in 1987, the suggestion that crime fiction was an appropriate subject for critical study would have been either laughed at or sneered at – or both – in academic circles. Although the bookshelves of my Oxford tutors all contained the familiar green-and-white spines of Penguin detective novels lurking among the collected poems, the nineteenth-century novels and the Early English Text Society medieval works, it was clear that these books were purely for recreation. But in the intervening years, the landscape of crime fiction has changed dramatically and so have attitudes to it. As with all ground-breaking developments, the study of crime fiction started small – a few academics publishing their PhD theses, the occasional symposium in out-of-the-way places (I remember attending one in Rostock in the early 1990s), occasional solus reviews in literary journals for those deemed to have ‘transcended the genre’. The seeds of change in the genre were sown in the 1980s, with writers such as Sara Paretsky and James Ellroy tearing up the traditional playbook. A veritable tsunami of writers followed, seizing on crime fiction as a way to write narratives shaped to appeal to readers and http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Crime Fiction Studies Edinburgh University Press

Preface

McDermid, Val
Crime Fiction Studies , Volume 1 (1): 1 – Mar 1, 2020
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Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Edinburgh University Press
ISSN
2517-7982
eISSN
2517-7990
DOI
10.3366/cfs.2020.0002
Publisher site
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Abstract

When my first novel, Report for Murder, was published in 1987, the suggestion that crime fiction was an appropriate subject for critical study would have been either laughed at or sneered at – or both – in academic circles. Although the bookshelves of my Oxford tutors all contained the familiar green-and-white spines of Penguin detective novels lurking among the collected poems, the nineteenth-century novels and the Early English Text Society medieval works, it was clear that these books were purely for recreation. But in the intervening years, the landscape of crime fiction has changed dramatically and so have attitudes to it. As with all ground-breaking developments, the study of crime fiction started small – a few academics publishing their PhD theses, the occasional symposium in out-of-the-way places (I remember attending one in Rostock in the early 1990s), occasional solus reviews in literary journals for those deemed to have ‘transcended the genre’. The seeds of change in the genre were sown in the 1980s, with writers such as Sara Paretsky and James Ellroy tearing up the traditional playbook. A veritable tsunami of writers followed, seizing on crime fiction as a way to write narratives shaped to appeal to readers and

Journal

Crime Fiction Studies – Edinburgh University Press

Published: Mar 1, 2020

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