Bloomsbury Series on Crime Fiction

 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC

Crime Fiction 

SERIES EDITORS: 

Andrew Pepper, Queen’s University Belfast, UK 

Stewart King, Monash University, Australia 

Caroline Reitz, John Jay College/ CUNY, USA 

This series will produce exciting, new understandings of crime fiction and crime fiction criticism in their national and international contexts and as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon. Offering studies of crime fiction in its broadest terms (including print fiction, graphic novels, TV serials, film, podcasts and more), the series aims to reflect what is a vibrant and burgeoning field of study, global in its scope, transmedial in its understanding of genre, and interdisciplinary in its method. 

It will encourage works that consider under-examined national traditions of crime fiction from around the world and puts these traditions in conversation with those ‘established’ accounts of crime fiction as genres which have emerged from the likes of Britain, France, and the United States. Works published in the series will also think critically about crime’s respective traditions and explore the legacies and continuing effects of colonialism, racism, patriarchy, capitalism etc. and to interrogate crime fiction’s complex entanglements with the politics of race, gender, class, sexuality and religion in the contemporary. 

• To develop the field’s understanding of crime fiction texts and traditions in national contexts that remain underexplored in Anglophone criticism 
• To explore crime fiction within a wider regional and/or continental area 
• To address crime fiction as world literature (and related issues of translation and translatability). 
• To pursue connections between crime fiction texts that focus on themes such climate change and environmental politics; gendered violence; racial and economic injustice; sexual politics and identities; globalisation; extinction threats and global health issues. 
• To think about the ways that crime fiction as genre and crime fiction criticism engages with historical forms of oppression and their contemporary legacies 
• To offer exciting, innovative, theoretically informed ways of examining canonical crime fiction texts and authors, placing them in new national and international contexts. 
• To develop an understanding of the breadth and diversity of crime fiction in transmedial and interdisciplinary contexts 
• To think about the relationship between crime fiction and other genres (true crime, horror, speculative and science fiction etc.). 

Call for proposals 

To discuss an idea for a book in the series, please contact the Senior Commissioning Editor: 

Lucy Strong, Senior Commissioning Editor, Literary Studies & Creative Writing 

lucy.strong@bloomsbury.com 

Crime Fiction, Policing and Racial Injustice

 Crime Fiction, Policing and Racial Injustice

Wednesday 10 November

6pm UK; 1pm EST; 10am Pacific.

This session will run for around 1.5 hours.

ORGANISED BY THE CENTRE FOR THE AMERICAS, Queen’s University Belfast

@AmericasCentre

https://www.qub.ac.uk/research-centres/cfta/events/UPCOMINGEVENTSandSEMINARS/

In this panel session, Frankie Bailey, a renowned criminal justice academic and crime novelist, Steph Cha, crime novelist and winner of the 2019 LA Book Prize, and academic and pop culture expert David Schmid discuss the capacities of crime fiction to critically reflect on the failures of policing in the US and the ongoing search for racial justice. The issue of whether a form or genre given over to the investigation of crime and that aims to give readers answers and resolutions can get to grips with the brokenness of the justice system will be discussed. As will the question of how to portray the police and policing in light of the killing of unarmed black men and women – and whether the traditional police procedural form is fit for purpose.

The roundtable discussion will last for about an hour. In the final 30 minutes, Steph Cha will read from her 2019 prize-winning novel Your House Will Pay and will answer questions about it.

Frankie Y Bailey (SUNY Albany)

Frankie is Professor of Criminal Justice in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs at SUNY Albany. As well as being a prolific academic whose work explores the intersections of crime, social history and popular culture, including Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters Crime and Detective Fiction (1991), she is the author of two separate crime fiction series, including a police procedural series featuring biracial police detective. Hannah McCabe, set in a near-future Albany: The Red Queen Dies (2013) and What the Fly Saw (2015). 

https://www.albany.edu/scj/faculty/frankie-bailey 

Steph Cha

Steph is the author of three crime novels featuring amateur sleuth and apprentice PI Juniper Song including Follow Her Home(2013). She is also the author of Your House Will Pay (2019), which examines the lasting consequences of the 1992 Los Angeles riots and shines a light at the contemporary injustices of policing and justice system. Your House Will Pay won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award. Steph is a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor, and is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology. http://stephcha.com/ 

David Schmid (SUNY Buffalo)

David is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Buffalo and one of the foremost scholars of crime fiction and pop culture. His research focuses on Americans’ unusual fascination with murder and murderers and the development of the popular culture of true crime in the U.S. He is the author of the ground-breaking study Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (U of Chicago Press 2005) as well as numerous edited books, anthologies and essays on crime fiction, violence, urban culture, horror and masculinity.

http://www.buffalo.edu/news/experts/david-schmid-faculty-expert-pop-culture.html

Chair: Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast, a.pepper@qub.ac.uk)

EVENTBRITE LINK: 

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/crime-fiction-policing-and-racial-injustice-tickets-198842943597  

Symposium: Crime Fiction and the Social Contract

 

Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast); Barbara Pezzotti 

and Carlos Uxó (Monash University)

Chaired by Dr Stewart King (Monash University)

Tuesday 28 September 2021, 8-10pm Melbourne; 6-8am New York; 11am-1pm London

To register for this Zoom symposium, please click here.

Crime Fiction and the Unravelling of the Social Contract: Generic Breakdown at the End of Days - Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast, English)

In this talk, I take as my starting point the turn by a number of crime writers towards the apocalypse and apocalyptic themes: namely, Lauren Beukes’s Afterland (2021), Hanna Jameson’s The Last (2019), Deon Meyer’s Fever (2017), Hye-Young Pyun’s The City of Ash and Red (2018), Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers (2019), and Ben Winters’s The Last Policeman (2012). In part, and looking at the long history of the genre, crime fiction has always been interested in the benefits and problems of the social contract: as I have argued, even the earliest crime stories ‘end up responding to the threat of social anarchy by justifying a Hobbesian move from the state of nature into the social contract while at the same time hinting, intentionally or otherwise, at the inadequacies of the state’s provisions for law enforcement’ (Unwilling Executioner, 24). These contemporary crime/apocalypse novels allow us to think about how much and how little has changed: in response to the spectres of global pandemics, nuclear explosion and climate emergencies, the states in these novels have evolved/crumbled and with this their imperfect mechanisms for maintaining order, law and justice. As such I am interested in teasing out and interrogating three related lines of critical enquiry: first the potential to read these texts as world literature, given the global nature of the threats and the breakdown of national traditions and borders; second, the issue of how the unravelling of the social contract occasioned by the apocalyptic threat is dealt with by or within the parameters of the crime story; and third, the extent to which this social unravelling presupposes and indeed produces an unravelling of genre or at least the emergence of new hybrid forms.

How the Social Contract has Failed Women - Barbara Pezzotti (Monash University, European Languages)

Crime fiction has been long accused of being a conservative genre that reaffirms the social order and endorses a patriarchal society. This view has been challenged by a number of crime novels which successfully denounce violence against women, and the evil of patriarchal societies that feeds such violence. In my talk I will analyse the representation of gender violence and femicide in Dacia Maraini’ Voices (1997), Maria-Antònia Oliver’s Study in Lilac (2001), and Stieg Larsson’s Men Who Hate Women (2005). I will show how these crime novelists use the crime fiction genre to shift the readers’ attention from an individual crime and an individual culprit to point to a systematic failure of Western States, and the social contract that pinpoints them. Throughout their narrative, these writers historicise the evil of femicide, arguing that far from being merely a matter for psychiatrists, it has profound roots in Western culture. They describe it as a pervasive evil in contemporary society and a gangrene very difficult to eradicate as it concerns everybody, and is not only identifiable with deviant personalities. Ultimately, I show how crime fiction can act as a privileged genre for exposing how the social contract has failed women.

Maintaining the Revolutionary Social Contract: The Role of Cuban Television Police Shows - Carlos Uxó (Monash University, European Languages)

Social contract theory is concerned with the legitimacy of authority over the individual and discusses to what extent, and why, individuals consent to surrender some of their freedoms in exchange for a social order from which they benefit in one way or another, and in which they feel protected. For the social contract to work, therefore, a body of laws must be created and shared by all members of a given society. But, do all members of a society enter into the social contract consensually? And how do the authorities remind citizens of their duty to abide by the social contract? Taking these issues as my starting point, in my talk I discuss the role Cuban television police shows have played in the maintenance of the Revolutionary social contract, by constantly reminding citizens of the rules they had to follow, and the penalties they would otherwise face. To that end, I analyse the television series Tras la huella, broadcast in Cuba since 2005.

Call for Papers: Murder, She Tweeted: Crime Narratives and the Digital Age

Murder, She Tweeted: Crime Narratives and the Digital Age

August 23-24, 2018

University of Tampere, Finland

Keynote speakers: Andrew Pepper (Queen's University Belfast) & Fiona Peters (Bath Spa University) First Call for Papers

The advent of new technologies and digital media have transformed society and influenced cultural narratives. The changes brought about by technological innovations, digitalisation, and globalisation have affected not only the subject matter and themes of contemporary crime narratives but also the production, distribution, and consumption of crime fiction on the global market, as well as the analytical tools, techniques, research methods, and theories available to scholars. 

These changes are readily visible in detectives' digital investigations or in how criminals employ digital technology in committing cybercrimes such as online stalking or theft. Moreover, the potential of digitalisation in modifying crime narratives nowadays ranges from podcasts such as "Serial" to Sherlock Holmes fan fiction to transmedia narration in "Sherlock" and the Twitter adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library.

We invite proposals for paper presentations on crime narratives and the digital age from different language and cultural spheres. The conference's approach to crime and the digital context is wide and covers a variety of contemporary crime narratives (e.g. novels, films, TV series, adaptations, true crime, fan fiction, vlogs, blogs and other social media) that can be examined in a number of ways.

We would like to welcome proposals which address one or several of the following topics (please note that the list is by no means exhaustive):

- production and the global market of crime narratives

- crime narratives, participatory production and fan practices

- new modes of narration and serialised storytelling in crime narratives

- multimodality and transmedia crime narratives

- remakes and social media adaptations of crime narratives

- social media and mobile technologies in or about crime narratives

- crimes and criminal agency

- criminal networks and transnational crime

- crime and thriller narratives and digital geopolitics

- policing, detective agency and (digital) methods of detection

- true crime narratives and cold case archives

- digital humanities and the study of crime narratives

- crime and digital culture in the postcolonial world

- virtual crime

- ecology, crime and digital technologies

Participants may contribute with individual presentations (20 min) or panel proposals (three presenters).

Please submit your proposal (max 300 words for individual presentations; for panels, please submit titles and abstracts of each paper) and a short biographical statement (including name, email address, institutional affiliation) to t.helen.mantymaki@jyu.fi and maarit.piipponen@uta.fi as attachments in rtf or doc format by March 20, 2018.

Conference fee: there is a conference fee of 70 euros (coffee, lunches, reception) and participants are expected to cover all costs for travel, accommodation, and subsistence themselves.

Organising committee:

Dr Helen Mäntymäki, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Dr Maarit Piipponen, University of Tampere, Finland.

Dr Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Dr Andrea Hynynen, University of Turku Finland​

“Murder, She Tweeted: Crime Narratives and the Digital Age” - Call For Papers

“Murder, She Tweeted: Crime Narratives and the Digital Age”

University of Tampere, Finland, August 23-24, 2018

Keynote speakers: Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast) & Fiona Peters (Bath Spa University)

The advent of new technologies and digital media have transformed society and influenced cultural narratives. The changes brought about by technological innovations, digitalisation, and globalisation have affected not only the subject matter and themes of contemporary crime narratives but also the production, distribution, and consumption of crime fiction on the global market, as well as the analytical tools, techniques, research methods, and theories available to scholars. These changes are readily visible in detectives’ digital investigations or in how criminals employ digital technology in committing cybercrimes such as online stalking or theft. Moreover, the potential of digitalisation in modifying crime narratives nowadays ranges from podcasts such as “Serial” to Sherlock Holmes fan fiction to transmedia narration in “Sherlock” and the Twitter adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library.

We invite proposals for paper presentations on crime narratives and the digital age from different language and cultural spheres. The conference’s approach to crime and the digital context is wide and covers a variety of contemporary crime narratives (e.g. novels, films, TV series, adaptations, true crime, fan fiction, vlogs, blogs and other social media) that can be examined in a number of ways.

We would like to welcome proposals which address one or several of the following topics (please note that the list is by no means exhaustive):

– production and the global market of crime narratives
– crime narratives, participatory production and fan practices
– new modes of narration and serialised storytelling in crime narratives
– multimodality and transmedia crime narratives
– remakes and social media adaptations of crime narratives
– social media and mobile technologies in or about crime narratives
– crimes and criminal agency
– criminal networks and transnational crime
– crime and thriller narratives and digital geopolitics
– policing, detective agency and (digital) methods of detection
– true crime narratives and cold case archives
– digital humanities and the study of crime narratives
– crime and digital culture in the postcolonial world
– virtual crime
– ecology, crime and digital technologies

Participants may contribute with individual presentations (20 min) or panel proposals (three presenters).

Please submit your proposal (max 300 words for individual presentations; for panels, please submit titles and abstracts of each paper) and a short biographical statement (including name, email address, institutional affiliation) to 

t.helen.mantymaki@jyu.fi and 

maarit.piipponen@uta.fi as attachments in rtf or doc format by March 20, 2018.

Conference fee: there is a conference fee of 70 euros (coffee, lunches, reception) and participants are expected to cover all costs for travel, accommodation and subsistence themselves.

Organising committee:

Dr Helen Mäntymäki, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Dr Maarit Piipponen, University of Tampere, Finland.
Dr Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Dr Andrea Hynynen, Finland.