Posted on 5 April 2013
This month, the University of Wales Press publishes an exciting new collection which reconsiders and rereads the significance of location in crime fiction.
Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes, edited by Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps, expands upon previous studies of the 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 latest volume published in the European Crime Fictions series, this wide-ranging collection looks at capital cities across Europe, from the more traditional centres of power – Paris, Rome and London – to Europe’s most northern capital, Stockholm. Importantly, the focus is not just on the capital cities which have long been associated with the genre, but it also considers on cities such as Cardiff, Edinburgh and Dublin, which are more immediately concerned with emerging national identities.
The texts under consideration span the nineteenth-century city mysteries to contemporary populist crime fiction. The collection opens with a reflective essay by Ian Rankin and aims to inaugurate a dialogue between Anglophone and European crime writing; to explore the marginalised works of Irish and Welsh writers alongside established European crime writers and to interrogate the relationship between fact and fiction, creativity and criticism, within the crime genre.
Appealing to academics and non-academics with an interest in crime fiction, the collection has both academic rigour and popular appeal.
Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps are PhD students and postgraduate tutors at Cardiff University.
/Ends
Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes (April 2013)
Edited by: Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps
Series: European Crime Fictions
£90 •HB • 9780708325865 • 234x156 mm • 208pp