Serial Crime Fiction

Crime Files Series General Editor: Clive Bloom Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has never been more popular. In novels, short stories, films, radio, television and now in computer games, private detectives and psychopaths, prim poisoners and overworked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination, and their creators one mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files is a ground-breaking series offering scholars, students and discerning readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detective fiction. Every aspect of crime writing, detective fiction, gangster movie, true-crime exposé, police procedural and post-colonial investigation is explored through clear and informative texts offering comprehensive coverage and theoretical sophistication. Published titles include: Maurizio Ascari A COUNTER-HISTORY OF CRIME FICTION Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational Pamela Bedore DIME NOVELS AND THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION Hans Bertens and Theo D’haen CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION Anita Biressi CRIME, FEAR AND THE LAW IN TRUE CRIME STORIES Clare Clarke LATE VICTORIAN CRIME FICTION IN THE SHADOWS OF SHERLOCK Paul Cobley THE AMERICAN THRILLER Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s Michael Cook NARRATIVES OF ENCLOSURE IN DETECTIVE FICTION The Locked Room Mystery Michael Cook DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE GHOST STORY The Haunted Text Barry Forshaw DEATH IN A COLD CLIMATE A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction Barry Forshaw BRITISH CRIME FILM Subverting the Social Order Emelyne Godfrey MASCULINITY, CRIME AND SELF-DEFENCE IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE Duelling with Danger Emelyne Godfrey FEMININITY, CRIME AND SELF-DEFENCE IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND SOCIETY From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes Lee Horsley THE NOIR THRILLER Merja Makinen AGATHA CHRISTIE Investigating Femininity Fran Mason AMERICAN GANGSTER CINEMA From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction Fran Mason HOLLYWOOD’S DETECTIVES Crime Series in the 1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to Hard-boiled Noir Linden Peach MASQUERADE, CRIME AND FICTION Criminal Deceptions Steven Powell (editor) 100 AMERICAN CRIME WRITERS Alistair Rolls and Deborah Walker FRENCH AND AMERICAN NOIR Dark Crossings Susan Rowland FROM AGATHA CHRISTIE TO RUTH RENDELL British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction Melissa Schaub MIDDLEBROW FEMINISM IN CLASSIC BRITISH DETECTIVE FICTION The Female Gentleman Adrian Schober POSSESSED CHILD NARRATIVES IN LITERATURE AND FILM Contrary States Lucy Sussex WOMEN WRITERS AND DETECTIVES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY CRIME FICTION The Mothers of the Mystery Genre Heather Worthington THE RISE OF THE DETECTIVE IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY POPULAR FICTION R.A. York AGATHA CHRISTIE Power and Illusion Crime Files Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–71471–3 (hardback) 978–0–333–93064–9 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Serial Crime Fiction Dying for More Edited by Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti Victorian University of Wellington, New Zealand Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti 2015 Individual chapters © Contributors 2015 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-48368-3 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-57214-4 ISBN 978-1-137-48369-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137483690 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Contents Acknowledgements viii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti 1 Part I The Sum of its Parts: What Makes a Series? 1 Stephen Burroughs, Serial Offender: Formula and Fraud in Early US Crime Literature Jon Blandford 11 2 The Myth of the Gentleman Burglar: Models of Serialization and Temporality in Early Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction Federico Pagello 21 3 More than the Sum of its Parts: Borges, Bioy Casares and the Phenomenon of the Séptimo Círculo Collection Carolina Miranda 31 4 Serializing Sullivan: Vian/Sullivan, the Série noire and the effet de collection Clara Sitbon, Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan and Alistair Rolls 41 5 Armed and Dangerous: Le Poulpe and the Formalization of French Noir Pim Higginson 52 6 Acts of Violence: The World War II Veteran Private-Eye Movie as an Ideological Crime Series Nick Heffernan 63 7 The Structure of the Whole: James Ellroy’s LA Quartet Series Steven Powell 74 Part II As Time Goes By: Progressing the Series 8 The Maturity of Lord Peter Wimsey and Authorial Innovation Within a Series Brittain Bright v 87 vi Contents 9 Series Fiction and the Challenge of Ideology: The Feminism of Sara Paretsky Sabine Vanacker 10 From Conflicted Mother to Lone Avenger: Transformations of the Woman Journalist Detective in Liza Marklund’s Crime Series Kerstin Bergman 99 111 11 It’s All One Book, It’s All One World: George Pelecanos’s Washington DC Eduardo Obradó 122 12 Serializing Evil: David Peace and the Formulae of Crime Fiction Nicoletta Vallorani 133 13 The Flavour of the Street: The Factory Series by Derek Raymond Anna Pasolini 144 14 Andrea Camilleri’s Imaginary Vigàta: Between Formula and Innovation Barbara Pezzotti 155 Part III Transposition, Imitation, Innovation 15 Sherlock Holmes in Hollywood: Film Series, Genre and Masculinities Maysaa Jaber 167 16 Murder, Mayhem and Clever Branding: The Stunning Success of J.B. Fletcher Rachel Franks and Donna Lee Brien 177 17 From Flâneur to Traceur?: Léo Malet and Cara Black Construct the PI’s Paris Jean Anderson 188 18 The City Lives in Me: Connectivity and Embeddedness in Australia’s Peter Temple and Shane Maloney Carolyn Beasley 197 19 ‘She’s pretty hardboiled, huh?’: Rewriting the Classic Detective in Veronica Mars Taryn Norman 208 Contents vii 20 ‘Exspecta Inexspectata’: The Rise of the Supernatural in Hybrid Detective Series for Young Readers Lucy Andrew 219 Bibliography 231 Index 251 Acknowledgements The editors wish to acknowledge the School of Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington and the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies for their support, and all the contributors for their invaluable interest from the start of this project. viii Notes on Contributors Jean Anderson is Associate Professor and Programme Director for French at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research interests are in late nineteenth-century and contemporary women’s writing, Francophone writing (Tahiti, Mauritius, Belgium), literary translation and crime fiction. She is the co-editor of The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations (2012). Lucy Andrew is a PhD candidate at Cardiff University. Her thesis is titled ‘The British Boy Detective: Origins, Forms and Functions, 1860–1940’. Her publications include ‘“Away with dark shadders!” Juvenile Detection Versus Juvenile Crime in The Boy Detective; or, The Crimes of London. A Romance of Modern Times’, Clues, 30:1 (2012), and Crime Fiction and the City: Capital Crimes (2013), co-edited with Catherine Phelps. Carolyn Beasley is Lecturer in Writing at Swinburne University of Technology, in Victoria, Australia. She writes widely on the relationship between crime fiction, place and social change. She is also an awardwinning fiction writer, literary judge, and author of The Fingerprint Thief (2013) and The Memory of Marble (2005). Kerstin Bergman, Affiliate Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Lund University in Sweden, is a literary critic and member of the Swedish Academy of Crime Fiction. Her numerous popular and scholarly publications include Swedish Crime Fiction: The Making of Nordic Noir (2014) and the edited collection on Swedish regional crime fiction, Deckarnas svenska landskap: från Skåne till Lappland (2014). She blogs about crime fiction at crimegarden.se. Jon Blandford is an Assistant Professor of English at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the author of a chapter on spectacle in the Ashgate Research Companion to Law and Humanities in Nineteenth-Century America (forthcoming 2016), and of a chapter on late nineteenth-century American women’s detective fiction in A Cambridge History of American Crime Fiction (forthcoming 2016). Donna Lee Brien is Professor of Creative Industries at Central Queensland University. Widely published in creative writing praxis and pedagogy, and specialist subgenres of non-fiction writing, Donna is ix x Notes on Contributors Cofounder of the Australasian Food Studies Network; Commissioning Editor, TEXT: Journal of Writers and Writing Programs; Founding Editorial Board member, LOCALE: The Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies; and Advisory Board Member, Æternum: The International Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies. Brittain Bright is a writer and photographer based in London, whose photographic work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally. She is completing her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, on place in Golden Age detective fiction. Rachel Franks (PhD) is a popular-culture researcher based in Sydney, Australia. Rachel is a Conjoint Fellow, The University of Newcastle (Australia) as well as Area Chair, Biography and Life Writing and Area Chair Fiction for the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand, she is also on the Editorial Board of The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction. She has delivered numerous papers based on her research in the areas of crime fiction, food studies and information science. Her work can be found in various books, journals and magazines as well as on social media. Nick Heffernan teaches American Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Capital, Class and Technology in Contemporary American Culture: Projecting Post-Fordism (2000) and the editor of Culture, Environment and Ecopolitics (2011). He writes on American literature, popular music and film, most recently ‘“No Parents, No Church or Authorities in Our Films”: Exploitation Films, the Youth Audience, and Roger Corman’s Counterculture Trilogy’, The Journal of Film and Video (2015). Pim Higginson teaches at Bryn Mawr College. He is the author of The Noir Atlantic: Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel (2011). He is currently working on a book that describes how the relationship between music and literature helps to articulate Western conceptions of race. He has also written on representations of the culinary in Caribbean and African fiction. Maysaa Jaber completed a PhD in English and American Studies at the University of Manchester. Her doctoral work examined literary representations of criminal femmes fatales in American hardboiled crime fiction in relation to medico-legal work on criminality, gender and sexuality from the 1920s until the end of World War II. She is now a lecturer at the University of Baghdad where she teaches literature. Her Notes on Contributors xi first monograph, The Criminal Femmes Fatales in American Hardboiled Crime Fiction, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. Carolina Miranda lectures at Victoria University, Wellington. Her research interests include translation and twentieth-century Latin American literature. She has published on Roberto Arlt’s theatre and narrative work and on Spanish, New Zealand and Argentine crime fiction. She has recently published The Foreign in International Crime Fiction (2012), co-edited with Anderson and Pezzotti. She is a board member of The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction. Taryn Norman is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee. Her current book project explores the use of Gothic conventions in canonical modernist and popular fiction texts from the early twentieth century. Her article ‘Gothic Stagings: Surfaces and Subtexts in the Popular Modernism of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot Series’ is forthcoming in Gothic Studies. Eduardo Obradó is a part-time lecturer at Universidad de Cantabria and a technical advisor on education to the Regional Government. He is currently writing his PhD thesis on representations of the city in contemporary American crime fiction. His fields of interest are secondlanguage acquisition and crime fiction in English. Federico Pagello is currently a Research Fellow of the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities at Queen’s University Belfast. His research focuses on the transmediality and the transnational circulation of popular culture, with a specific interest in the relationship between film, comics and genre literature. He has published a monograph on the image of the city in the superhero film (Grattacieli e superuomini: l’immagine della metropoli fra cinema e fumetto, 2010) (Skyscrapers and Supermen: The Image of the Metropolis Between Cinema and Comics). Anna Pasolini holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Milan. Her main fields of research are cultural studies and gender studies, with a beginning interest in corpus stylistics. Her research areas include feminist rewritings of fairy tales and crime fiction and, more specifically, the representation and mapping of gender(ed) and transcultural/postcolonial identities in noir fiction. Barbara Pezzotti is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS). She is the author of The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction: A Bloody Journey (2012) and xii Notes on Contributors Politics and Society in Italian Crime Fiction: An Historical Overview (2014). She is co-editor of The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations (2012). Steven Powell’s research interests include American crime fiction and British politics in popular culture. He is the editor of Conversations with James Ellroy (2012) and 100 American Crime Writers (2012). He is currently adapting his thesis into a monograph to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. Alistair Rolls, Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia, has published widely on the works of Boris Vian and other twentieth-century French authors. More recently his work has focused on French crime fiction. His books in this area include Paris and the Fetish: Primal Crime Scenes (2014), French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (2009), co-written with Deborah Walker, and the edited collection Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction (2009). Clara Sitbon is a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research focuses on establishing a theory of literary hoaxes, and examining its effect on authorship through the example of the famous Vernon Sullivan Hoax (France, 1946–50). Nicoletta Vallorani is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Milan. Her specializations include media studies, gender studies and queer studies. She has published a number of essays on formula fiction, with particular reference to David Peace’s novels. Her recent volume, Millennium London: Of Other Spaces and the Metropolis (2012), includes essays on Iain Sinclair and Will Self. She is also a crime fiction writer. Sabine Vanacker is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. Her research interests centre on twentieth-century women’s writing, crime fiction and the literature of migration. She has published on Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Arthur Conan Doyle and Sara Paretsky and co-edited Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle: Multi-Media Afterlives (2013). A reviews editor for the Journal of Gender Studies, she is currently preparing a monograph on P.D. James. Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She recently published Transfert de langue, transfert de culture. La traduction en français du roman Southern Steel de l’Australienne Dymphna Cusack (2012). She is currently collaborating on an analysis of the translation of Australian crime fiction and its reception in France.