‘Bags stuffed with the offal of their own history’: Crime fiction and the short story in Crimespotting: An Edinburgh Crime Collection

This article explores innovative uses of the short story format in the recent collection Crimespotting: An Edinburgh Crime Collection (2009). The article examines these crime short stories’ use of ‘place’, specifically Edinburgh, as a unifying theme and setting for its diverse crime motifs. The article analyzes how selected texts from the collection negotiate the short story format and the crime genre, and explores the diverse fictions which emerge from this. The article suggests that the short stories in Crimespotting: An Edinburgh Crime Collection illustrate how the genre’s diversity and range may expand the possibilities of crime fiction in challenging and unexpected ways.