In addition to being a television crime drama junky, Jarrod Hayes first became interested in scholarship on crime fiction in relation to studying and teaching the French New Novel, particularly Michel Butor’s 1957 L’emploi du temps, translated into English as Passing Time. This novel offers a theorization of the detective that allowed Hayes, in his second book, Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree (Michigan, 2016), to explore the way in which the work of finding and returning to one’s roots resembles the work of the detective in that both involve returns to the beginnings of their own stories, beginnings that only become beginnings through their placement in the story that the detective’s job is to tell.
Hayes’s current research interests include transnational comparative approaches to crime fiction and the role of representations of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in crime fiction. He is Professor of French Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His research is situated at the intersections of French postcolonial studies and queer theory. He is also the author of Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (Chicago, 2000), and he co-edited, with Margaret R. Higonnet and William J. Spurlin, Comparatively Queer: Interrogating Identities across Time and Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). His current project is titled Reading across the Color Line: Racialization in the French Americas, which seeks to foster dissonance between Anglo-American readers’ expectations and French representations of race as well as denaturalize race through readings of the cultural productions of French America. With Alistair Rolls, he wrote “World Crime Fiction in French”, included in The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction, edited by Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Alistair Rolls (Cambridge, 2022). And with Alistair Rolls and Clara Sitbon, he is co-editing A New History of World Crime Fiction in French (Liverpool, forthcoming), to which he is contributing two chapters: “Losing One’s Head in French Crime Fiction” and “Witchy Women on Trial”.