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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014
Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014
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Why crime?
More LessAbstractIn this article, the author, an established crime novelist, examines what distinguishes the crime novel form and some of the ways in which it has been regarded by both past and present authors and critics, and with reference to his own practice.
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Detection in the second degree in French urban mystery novels
More LessAbstractThis article uses the palimpsest as an interpretative lens through which to consider Fortuné du Boisgobey’s Mystères du Nouveau Paris (1876) as a rewriting of Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris ([1842–43] 1989). In particular, via an examination of Boisgobey’s use of the hunting metaphor, I demonstrate the central role of the mystères urbains/urban mysteries in a hypertextual chain linking the adventure novel and the later roman policier/detective novel. Boisgobey veers between emphasizing the familiarity of the hunting cliché and wilfully subverting it, and this playful oscillation is echoed en abyme within the diegesis. The urban mystery novel, I suggest, emerges as an important precursor of the detective novel, in that this deliberate and sophisticated alternation between the predictable and the surprising echoes the ambiguity inherent to the palimpsest and integral to modern crime fiction.
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Crime in popular fiction: Remembering the Algerian War of Independence in contemporary French crime fiction
More LessAbstractCritics have evoked parallels between the French experience of Vichy during World War II and the Algerian War of Independence, in terms of their intensely divisive nature and the difficulty the French have had, and continue to have, in acknowledging repressed memories of both conflicts. France has come rather further in confronting its Vichy past than it has in facing up to repressed memories of the Algerian War. In addition to the memory work done by historians and film-makers, occluded memories of Vichy and occupation have been tackled by writers of crime fiction. While the investigatory framework of the crime novel has been identified as an ideal narrative tactic for unearthing forgotten or hidden memories of the past, little critical attention has yet been paid to its deployment in remembering the Algerian War of Independence. This article aims to examine the ways in which the conflict is remembered through selected crime novels by three French writers: Maurice Attia, Didier Daeninckx and Maurice Gouiran, and the part these texts play in ongoing memory work.
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Francoism and the formula of fear in Spanish crime fiction: The case of Jordi Sierra i Fabra’s Cinco días de octubre/Five Days in October
By Stewart KingAbstractThis article explores the generic conventions of Jordi Sierra i Bosch’s third novel of his ‘Inspector Mascarell’ series, Cinco días de octubre/Five Days in October (2011). The article situates this novel and the series in the context of the so-called return of historical memory in democratic, post-Franco Spain. In particular, it argues that Sierra i Fabra uses the narrative conventions of the detective thriller to transport readers to the past so they can experience the fear felt by the Republican losers of the Spanish Civil War living under the Franco regime and, in so doing, engage readers emotionally in this traumatic past with the aim of overcoming the nation’s historical disengagement.
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Gendering the genre: Three Australian women writers and their debut crime fiction novels
More LessAbstractThe creators and consumers of crime fiction have changed dramatically since the genre, established in ancient times to define legal and moral codes and indicate the consequences for breaking those codes, first started to gain widespread popularity as a form of entertainment in the eighteenth century. One of the most significant of these changes can be seen in the slow but steady rise of the female as consumer, creator and character. There are many ways to explore some of the gendered changes within the crime fiction genre, one of which is to examine novels written by women who have chosen female protagonists to tell their stories. Ostensibly quite different texts, Miles Franklin’s Bring the Monkey (1933), June Wright’s Murder in the Telephone Exchange (1948) and Elizabeth Antill’s Death on the Barrier Reef (1952) are three debut crime novels that share some striking similarities. In addition to all three novels featuring female first-person narrators, these stories also tell tales of very violent crimes and contribute to documenting some of the shifts in views on gender, female friendship, marriage and class within what has become the world’s most popular genre.
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Crime on the Airwaves: The Carter Brown Mystery Theatre
More LessAbstractIn the mid-1950s, Carter Brown Mystery books were selling in the millions in Australia; their robust humour and simple plots made them ideal fodder for radio adaptation. The Carter Brown Mystery Theatre did not make a great impact upon Australian radio per se, but it was popular enough to be onsold overseas. This article explores the Carter Brown Mystery Theatre as an exemplar of recuperating an unexplored area of the Australian radio industry: popular crime serials. Finally, it posits a ‘grammar’ of radio.
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What’s broken in Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore?
More LessAbstractCrime fiction, in its various forms, has produced many remarkable and memorable characters. But beyond the interest we might take in the individual destinies of the protagonists crime novels arouse in us a more fundamental and deep-seated desire: the yearning for order to be reestablished following the scandalous transgression of society’s laws and conventions. Dysfunction and rupture, and the quest for their repair, are thus defining features of the crime genre. In Peter Temple’s 2005 novel The Broken Shore, however, disorder and disruption extend to every facet of society, and are even reflected in the prose itself. By examining the omnipresence of rupture in the novel, this essay seeks to provide a greater appreciation both of Peter Temple’s vision of Australian society and of the originality of his approach to the conventions of crime fiction.
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Smoking in Arcadia, or Barry Maitland’s embodied folly: Re-opening the case of The Malcontenta
More LessAbstractThis article reveals the multilayered structure of Barry Maitland’s second Brock and Kolla mystery, The Malcontenta (1995). In particular, it will be shown how the concept of hospitality is reflexively staged, as is the concept of the novel’s paratextual skin and sub-dermal liminal zones, in order to set up any number of border crossings and transgressions. To this end, the work of the Yale School of deconstructionists is used to demonstrate how each border crossing suggests an alternative reading of the text. Multiple instances of mise en abyme will be exposed as, respectively, the authority of detective, author and reader is challenged. Certain red herrings will be elevated to the status of alternate solutions and, finally, a suggested alternate murderer will be installed from outside the more obvious candidates on offer.
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The Heat of Deeds: A true crime history of penal Newcastle
By David MurrayAbstractThe penal outstation of Newcastle, New South Wales was an early nineteenth-century British experiment in secondary punishment. Its twenty years of operation from 1804 to 1821 encompassed the Rum Rebellion of 1807, the expansive governorship of Lachlan Macquarie and a population boom of convicts and free settlers following the Napoleonic wars. Defined by contemporary methods of corporal punishment, penology and martial law, it would establish itself as a productive hard labour settlement that at various times provided the new colony – especially Sydney Town – with coal, timber, salt and building lime. It was also a uniquely intimate and human world that housed, fed, broke and occasionally redeemed its motley crew of gaolers and reoffending convicts, whose original population of 100 peaked at a 1000 by 1820. It is also the setting for ‘The Heat of Deeds’, a creative nonfiction, true crime narrative experiment by Dr Murray, which reconstructs the incomplete, archival traces of some of its residents into stories grounded in the squalor, violence, resilience, desperation and grace of the lived, convict experience. The following extract refers to the outstation’s final years as a penal facility.
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Exhibition Review
More LessAbstractAmerican Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, 19 October 2012–28 April 2013.
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Reviews
Authors: Carolyn Beasley, Tessa Chudy and Rachel FranksAbstractThe Richmond Conspiracy, Andrew Grimes (2012) Melbourne: Text Publishing, 320 pp., ISBN: 9781921922664, p/bk, AU $29.99.
The Female Detective, Andrew Forrester (2012) London: The British Library, 328 pp., ISBN: 9780712358781, p/bk, AUS $13.
The Broken Shore, Peter Temple (2011) Melbourne: Text Publishing, 345 pp., ISBN: 9781921656774, p/bk, AUS$23.95
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