The Post Colonial Detective

Taking up a neglected area in the study of the crime novel, this collection investigates the growing number of writers who adapt conventions of detective fiction to expose problems of law, ethics, and truth that arise in postcolonial and transnational communities. While detective fiction has been linked to imperialism and constructions of race from its earliest origins, recent developments signal the evolution of the genre into a potent framework for narrating the complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a postcolonial world. Among the authors considered are Vikram Chandra, Gabriel García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mario Vargas Llosa, Suki Kim, and Walter Mosley. The essays explore detective stories set in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and North America, including novels that view the American metropolis from the point of view of Asian American, African American, or Latino characters. Offering ten new and original essays by scholars in the field, this volume highlights the diverse employment of detective fictions internationally, and uncovers important political and historical subtexts of popular crime novels.

What happens to detective fiction when the detective is 'post-colonial', a marginalized native or settler in a country recovering from colonialism? Post-colonial detection is an exciting hybrid of western-influenced police methods and plot conventions and indigenous cultural insights and wisdom in exotic settings. An introduction to the peculiarities of the post-colonial detective and to post-colonial theory establishes a context in which to view more than a dozen notable detectives and authors from around the world.

Taking up a neglected area in the study of the crime novel, this collection investigates the growing number of writers who adapt conventions of detective fiction to expose problems of law, ethics, and truth that arise in postcolonial and transnational communities. While detective fiction has been linked to imperialism and constructions of race from its earliest origins, recent developments signal the evolution of the genre into a potent framework for narrating the complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a postcolonial world. Among the authors considered are Vikram Chandra, Gabriel García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mario Vargas Llosa, Suki Kim, and Walter Mosley. The essays explore detective stories set in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and North America, including novels that view the American metropolis from the point of view of Asian American, African American, or Latino characters. Offering ten new and original essays by scholars in the field, this volume highlights the diverse employment of detective fictions internationally, and uncovers important political and historical subtexts of popular crime novels.

In 1929, Ronald Knox, a prominent member of the English Detection Club, included in his tongue-in-cheek Ten Commandments for Detective Novelists the rule that "No Chinaman must figure in the story." In 1983, Ruth Rendell published Speaker of Mandarin, reflecting not only a change in British detective fiction but also a dramatic change in the British cultural landscape. Like much of the rest of British popular culture, the detective novel became more and more ethnically diverse and populated by characters with increasingly varied religious backgrounds. Ten essays examine the changing nature of British detective fiction, focusing on the shifting view of "otherness" of such authors as Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George, Peter Ackroyd, Caroline Graham, Christopher Brookmyer, Denise Mina and John Mortimer. Unlike their American counterparts, British detective writers have been until recently, overwhelmingly white, and the essays here explore how these authors delve into ethnic diversity within a historically homogeneous culture. Religion has also played an important role in the genre, ranging from the moral certainty of the early part of the 20th century to the skepticism and hostility that is part of contemporary fiction. How this transition was made and how it reflects the changing nature of British culture are detailed here.

Recent crime fiction increasingly transcends national boundaries, with investigators operating across countries and continents. Frequently, the detective is a migrant or comes from a transcultural background. To solve the crime, the investigator is called upon to decipher the meaning(s) hidden in clues and testimonies that require transcultural forms of understanding. For the reader, the investigation discloses new interpretive methods and processes of social investigation, often challenging facile interpretations of the postcolonial world order. Under the rubric 'postcolonial postmortems', this collection of essays seeks to explore the tropes, issues and themes that characterise this emergent form of crime fiction. But what does the 'postcolonial' bring to the genre apart from the well-known, and valid, discourses of resistance, subversion and ethnicity? And why 'postmortems'? A dissection and medical examination of a body to determine the cause of death, the 'postmortem' of the postcolonial not only alludes to the investigation of the victim's remains, but also to the body of the individual text and its contexts. This collection interrogates literary concepts of postcoloniality and crime from transcultural perspectives in the attempt to offer new critical impulses to the study of crime fiction and postcolonial literatures. International scholars offer insights into the 'postcolonial postmortems' of a wide range of texts by authors from Africa, South Asia, the Asian and African Diaspora, and Australia, including Robert G. Barrett, Unity Dow, Wessel Ebersohn, Romesh Gunesekera, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sujata Massey, Alexander McCall Smith and Michael Ondaatje.

As anthropologists have often been considered a kind of culture detectives, so Keating's fictional detective Inspector Ghote of the Bombay Police is here considered a kind of anthropologist, illuminating some of the core moral and ethical issues of modern India. Tamaya also explores how Indian-born British writer Keating eludes the orientalism that haunts so many of his ilk. Paper edition (unseen), $12.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR