Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes

Product Description Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes expands upon previous studies of urban space and crime by reflecting on the treatment of the capital city—a repository of authority, national identity, and culture—within crime fiction. The essays examine a broad array of crime writing set in capital cities, from the nineteenth-century gothic city mysteries of Paris, London, and Rome, to contemporary fiction located in newly devolved centers of power like Cardiff, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Stockholm. The collection brings together academics and creative writers, including an opening reflective essay by Ian Rankin. Review “This 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 The Mysteries of the Cities, the collection has both academic rigor and popular appeal.” -- Heather Worthington, Cardiff University About the Author Lucy Andrew is a doctoral candidate and postgraduate tutor at Cardiff University.Catherine Phelps is a doctoral candidate and postgraduate tutor at Cardiff University. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Crime Fiction in the CityCapital CrimesBy Lucy Andrew, Catherine PhelpsUniversity of Wales PressCopyright © 2013 The ContributorsAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-7083-2586-5ContentsAcknowledgements, Notes on Contributors, 1 Introduction Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps, 2 Edinburgh Ian Rankin, 3 'The map that engenders the territory'? Rethinking Ian Rankin's Edinburgh Gill Plain, 4 Corralling Crime in Cardiff's Tiger Bay Catherine Phelps, 5 Crimes and Contradictions: the Fictional City of Dublin Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, 6 From National Authority to Urban Underbelly: Negotiations of Power in Stockholm Crime Fiction Kerstin Bergman, 7 Streets and Squares, Quartiers and Arrondissements: Paris Crime Scenes and the Poetics of Contestation in the Novels of Jean-François Vilar Margaret Atack, 8 The Mysteries of the Vatican: from Nineteenth-century Anti-clerical Propaganda to Dan Brown's Religious Thrillers Maurizio Ascari, 9 A Tale of Three Cities: Megalopolitan Mysteries of the 1840s Stephen Knight, Conclusion Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps, CHAPTER 1Introduction:LUCY ANDREW AND CATHERINE PHELPSThe growth of the metropolis in the early nineteenth century has been the subject of much commentary by contemporaneous thinkers. Charles Baudelaire and, later, Georg Simmel, both noted the alienation felt by city-dwellers, fuelled in part by the anonymity of the urban space. In his seminal essay, 'The metropolis and mental life', Simmel also expanded on the individual's freedom to develop outside a closed rural community or small town. As many were drawn to the city in search of work, so they left the watchful eye of a familiar and secure community. No wonder, then, that the city became such a popular setting for a relatively new genre: crime fiction. The sprawling urban streets provided a multiplicity of settings from Dickens's rookeries to the decayed yet aristocratic Fauborg Saint-Germain, home to Poe's creation, Auguste Dupin. Anonymous and alone amongst a transient population, a criminal could go undetected, even hide behind new identities