Criminal Moves Towards a Theory of Crime Fiction Mobility

Abstract

This chapter presents the book’s theoretical framework, which consists in an understanding of crime fiction as an inherently mobile genre. Where crime fiction has traditionally, which typically means since the first texts of Edgar Allan Poe, been seen as static and staid, it is argued that it is in fact defined by three forms of mobility: 1) the mobility of meaning (the textual fluidity that characterizes crime fiction irrespective of the detective’s authoritative solution); 2) the mobility of genre (resulting from the interplay of affirming and violating genre rules and boundaries); and 3) transnational mobility (crime fiction as a transnational practice characterized by the multidirectional transmission and adaptation of styles, structures and themes across national borders). This theory of crime fiction mobility enables a comprehensive reinterpretation of the history of the genre that also has profound ramifications for our reading of individual crime fiction texts.

CrimateFiction and the Environmental Imagination of Place

“…Recent crime fiction scholarship, nevertheless, has begun to challenge the dominant focus on the local (i.e., the national) in crime fiction and has instead sought to explore the transnational connections that have always existed in the crime genre (Schmid; King; Pepper; Pepper and Schmid; Gulddal et al; Pezzotti). In a brilliantly argued study, David Schmid charts how crime narratives make any number of places meaningful, from locked rooms, manor houses, cities, and regions to the entire planet.…”

“…The endings to The Smell of Rain and The Healer challenge two long‐held practices in crime fiction and crime fiction scholarship respectively: the narrative closure that occurs in many, but not all, crime novels and the national framing of crime fiction that underlies much scholarship on the genre (Gulddal et al. 1–24).…”

Violence, Ethics, Representation: Don Winslow and Roberto Bolaño in Ciudad Juárez

“…For instance, with regard to crime fiction, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Alistair Rolls argue that "[a] mobile concept of genre resists taxonomy and attunes itself instead to the fluid, hybrid and mutative aspects of crime fiction," emphasizing "not how individual crime narratives embody pre-existing patterns, but, on the contrary, how they transform these patterns through processes of negation and adaptation." 7 With this idea of genre in mind, there are multiple points of overlap between The Cartel, which seems to operate most obviously as a crime novel or thriller but which borrows from a range of other genres including war, espionage, and horror fiction, and 2666, which is described by Sharae Deckard as a "genre-bending novel" that uses and incorporates aspects of "an academic satire," "philosophical thriller," "Beat road novel," "crime/detective fiction," and "historical fiction." 8 The Cartel is the middle installment of a trilogy of novels about the U.S.-led "war on drugs" and its hemispheric ramifications and is organized around the long struggle between Sinaloan narco boss Adán Barrera and U.S. Drug Enforcement Agent (DEA) Art Keller.…”