Description
Book SynopsisA collection of academic essays by literary critics and writers of crime fiction - including a reflective essay by Ian Rankin on his own work - that explores the relationship between crime fiction and the urban spaces of the capital city.
Trade ReviewThis exciting new collection reconsiders and rereads the significance of location in crime fiction. Cities and crime have always been inextricably connected: city living engenders crime in its juxtaposition of wealth and poverty and in the anonymity and alienation of the individual in the mass. 'Crime Fiction in the City' takes this as its beginning and goes on to consider the national and identity politics inherent in locating crime fiction in cities. Importantly, the focus is not just on the capital cities of London, Paris and Rome, which have long been associated with the genre, but on cities such as Cardiff and Edinburgh, Dublin and Stockholm, which are more immediately concerned with emerging national identities. Opening with crime writer Ian Rankin's exposition on Edinburgh and closing with Professor Stephen Knight's exploration of the nineteenth-century crime-inflected 'Mysteries of the Cities', the collection has both academic rigour and popular appeal. Dr Heather Worthington, Cardiff University
Table of ContentsIntroduction Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps 1 Edinburgh Ian Rankin 2 'The map that engenders the territory'? Rethinking Ian Rankin's Edinburgh Gill Plain 3 Corralling Crime in Cardiff's Tiger Bay Catherine Phelps 4 Crimes and Contradictions: the Fictional City of Dublin Cormac O Cuilleanain 5 From National Authority to Urban Underbelly: Negotiations of Power in Stockholm Crime Fiction Kerstin Bergman 6 Streets and Squares, Quartiers and Arrondissements: Paris Crime Scenes and the Poetics of Contestation in the Novels of Jean-Francois Vilar Margaret Atack 7 The Mysteries of the Vatican: From Nineteenth-Century Anti-Clerical Propaganda to Dan Brown's Religious Thrillers Maurizio Ascari 8 A Tale of Three Cities: Megalopolitan Mysteries of the Eighteen-Forties Stephen Knight Conclusion Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps
