Marla Harris
PhD Brandeis University, English literature
Graduate study, University of Minnesota-Minneapolis
B.A., M.A. University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Address: Winchester, Massachusetts, United States
Graduate study, University of Minnesota-Minneapolis
B.A., M.A. University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Address: Winchester, Massachusetts, United States
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Papers by Marla Harris
In contrast, my focus today is on a number of recent fictions from around the world, which center on older women who engage in criminal acts, including theft and murder. In this paper I examine Helene Tursten’s collection of Swedish short stories, An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good (2018), Olga Tokarczuk’s Polish novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009), Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg’s Swedish novel The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules (2012), and the British film Golden Years (2016), all texts in which older female protagonists become vigilantes, taking justice into their own hands...
If “Old age appears as the problematic, bewildering Other to that which is considered to be life's norm,” as postcolonial critic Harm-Peer Zimmerman (2016) puts it, the older woman is doubly othered as not-male and not-young (83)...
My interest lies in how Scottish writer Fiona Erskine incorporates chemistry into her detective fiction, blending spy novel, feminist hard-boiled detective novel, Gothic novel, and eco-thriller. Her Chemical Detective series (2019- ) centers on Jaq Silver, former university lecturer and explosives expert. Unlike the typical fictional female forensic scientist-detective, she does not work for the police or for a government. She resembles Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone and Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander—a risk-taking loner with a complicated backstory, unapologetically sexual, driven by a strong sense of integrity, and willing to break the law.
In addition, Erskine has written a different kind of scientific detective story—Phosphate Rocks: A Death in Ten Objects (2021). The discovery of an unknown corpse, buried beneath a closed chemical plant, becomes less a crime story than a thoughtful social history that critiques the failure of multinational corporations to care for their employees and communities.
Erskine’s unconventional narratives, which defy easy generic classification, offer a refreshing take on science and technology in popular culture.